Could sharing ketchup over french fries be an 'indirect kiss?'

Click here for more articles by Kormedi.com. Sharing french fries with a friend can sometimes lead to a familiar moment: You take a bite, then plunge the same fry back into the communal ketchup. It may seem harmless, particularly among close friends. Children and teenagers sometimes jokingly call sharing food this way an "indirect kiss." As it turns out, the joke may have a little science behind it. Bacteria from the mouth can indeed make their way into a shared sauce when someone takes a bite and dips the food again, a practice known as "double dipping." But how many double dips would it take to transfer roughly as many bacteria as a 10-second kiss? The answer, based on a playful comparison of findings from separate studies, is around 800,000. Double dipping can transfer oral bacteria Researchers at Clemson University in the United States examined how much bacteria could be transferred when a person bites into food and then dips it back into a shared sauce. Their findings were published in the Journal of Food Safety. The experiment confirmed that bacteria from the mouth can enter the sauce