Okay. I want you to imagine this. You're sitting down to enjoy a meal with your family, when you hear that the food on your plate has actually been recalled. Pretty jarring thought, right? But at the same time, it's something that seems to be coming up more and more these days. As you may remember, just this summer, millions of pounds of Boar's Head deli meat were removed from stores. Why? A listeria outbreak that led to dozens of hospitalizations and at least ten deaths. More recently, you may have heard of the outbreak of E coli linked to McDonald's, the likely source, their slivered onions used in their quarter pounders. It does feel like everywhere we turn, there's been another food safety issue in the news.

Ready to eat meat producer BrucePac has recalled nearly 10 million pounds of meat and poultry products.

Church Brothers Farms out of Salinas has recalled nearly 1300 cases of green onions.

More than 600 frozen waffle products from more than a dozen brands are being voluntarily recalled due to a potential listeria contamination.

Health experts are investigating an outbreak of E.coli linked to tainted carrots.

But this isn't necessarily a surprise to everyone.

People love to say we have the safest food supply in the world. I am not one of those people.

That's Dr. Don Schaffner. He's a food safety expert. He has been studying foodborne illnesses for decades. Currently, he's a department chair and distinguished professor at Rutgers University. I really wanted to have him on the podcast today to understand what is happening with our food. What can we do about it? And with the holidays approaching, a time when many of us gather with loved ones to cook and share food, I wanted to take a closer look at this issue with him.

Here are the questions. Our food recalls really becoming more common. Why are they happening? And I think, most importantly, what can you do to protect yourself and your family from getting sick? I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent. And this is Chasing Life.

When you think of these terms, outbreaks recalls, things like that. I think sometimes people use these interchangeably. So I just want to spend a minute getting the terms correct. What does it mean when a food is recalled?

Yeah, that's an excellent question. And I often hear people confusing those things and they're absolutely not the same. So food can be recalled for a variety of reasons. And FDA and USDA have these recall structures where it's class one, two and three, depending upon the severity. Right. The most severe kind of a recall is when we have a strong suspicion that a pathogenic microorganism might be in a food. And so that's a class one recall. And we want to take all deliberate speed with that. We can also have recalls for potential allergens. So we might have peanuts in a cookie that doesn't say peanuts on the label. Right. And so we want to recall that you can also have recalls for labels that are incorrect. The wrong kind of food was put in the package or the weight of the food in the package is not what it says on the label. And so that could be a reason for a recall.

So recalls can be for relatively minor reasons or relatively major reasons. That's in contrast to outbreaks. When you have an outbreak, you know for sure that these people ate these foods. And a lot of times we have recalls, but no outbreaks because it was a minor problem or, you know, didn't result in enough product getting out. There are enough cases to result in a reportable outbreak. And so in those cases, we have recalls and no outbreaks. We also can have outbreaks where we linked together things and then those outbreaks trigger recalls. And we saw that with Boar's Head, for example, okay. CDC has announced that there is an ongoing listeria outbreak. We don't know what it's linked to, but we think it's meat that has been sliced at retail, grocery store, delicatessens. And then from there, we discovered, in fact, it is the Boar's Head and it is the liverwurst. And then the recalls proceeded from there. So and we may also have situations where we have an outbreak and we never learn what the cause is, in which case we don't have a recall. But but for example, with the McDonald's slivered onions situation, we have an outbreak and we had a recall, but those slivered onions were only recalled within food service distribution. There were no onions sliced at this facility that people could buy in the grocery store.

Let me let me ask this. Are these outbreaks becoming more frequent?

Well, I think... the short answer is no. I think outbreaks are random events and sometimes random events are spread apart and sometimes they come close together. And so I think this is an example of, you know, Boar's Head is one regulatory agency, and there's a company that definitely screwed up. McDonald's Onions are a different regulatory agency and a different kind of screw up. And so, no, I really think it's just coincidence.

How important is regulation? And obviously everyone knows that it's important, but if it's becoming more lax, for whatever reason, are we more at risk of outbreaks? Is there a direct link there?

Well, I don't think the regulations and the regulations are certainly not becoming more lax. They're anything but right? Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2011 that resulted in the produce safety rule. Those are rules that are designed to keep situations like the slivered onions problem from happening. When those regulations were first passed or first developed, they were the first regulations for on farm food safety that farmers had ever seen. Right. And so it's taking a while for them to kind of get up to speed with with what's going on there. I think another possible explanation that we need to think about is the fact that the CDC is getting better and better at finding outbreaks thanks to advances in whole genome sequencing. Right. So it may have been in the past we had outbreaks like this, but we could never link them together because we didn't know that all of these different people in all of these different states all got sick around the same time from eating the same food.

So with the genomic sequencing, this isn't so much necessarily about preventing them as the idea that, look, there's something happening over here and in one state or one county, something else happening here, we can link them together now because they sequenced the genome of whatever the pathogen might be.

Right, and we know that it's the same virtually indistinguishable organisms at the same time. So then the epidemiologists go to work and they ask people questions like, what did you eat? And then they begin to put the pieces together. And you're right, detection of that particular outbreak does not lead to prevention of that outbreak. But hopefully what we learn from that outbreak and the causes, the root causes of that outbreak, we do learn from that. And then we can do better to stop that from happening the next time.

Did it surprise you at all that with the slivered onion situation with McDonald's that it was all from one facility, or is that the norm when it comes to these large fast food chains?

Yeah, Well, if you're a big chain like McDonald's, you want consistency, right? And you want suppliers that can supply you with the quantity of product that you need. That's. Your specifications. And so it's not surprising to me.

And in fact, a number of years ago, you may remember at Chipotle had a string of bad luck and maybe some bad decision making. And one of the things that Chipotle they used to do was they would source from many different local suppliers, which is good on the one hand, but it's bad on the other hand, because if you have one big supplier and you really lean on them to do a lot with food safety, that's easier to assure quality and to assure safety. So it was not surprising to me, it was a large supplier that was supplying all of these McDonald's and perhaps they sourced some onions. They or they grew the onions themselves in a field and they didn't follow good agricultural practices. And again, this is all me just speculating. We still don't really know and we may in fact never know. Because what will happen often in a situation like this is we'll trace it back to a particular product that we know that it was grown in a particular region of the country at a particular time. But once the outbreak has transpired and we do the trace back, and once investigators get back to that field where that or that field where they think the product came from, that field may no longer be producing that particular food anymore. And so now it becomes a lot more difficult to figure out what's the root cause. And you can test for water sources, you can look for animal intrusion in the area, but it becomes really difficult.

Can you just sort of talk us through the process? So let's say something is recalled and maybe we can use the McDonald's sort of example. So there's a suspicion people are getting sick. First of all, is this USDA or FDA that then sort of immediately sort of starts to investigate?

So this is an oversimplification, but if it's meat and poultry, it's USDA that has regulatory authority. If it's anything else, it's FDA. And then it's a little complicated, too, because let's say let's think about the McDonald's outbreak. Those McDonald's exist in states and in towns and in counties which may also have their own local public health that go out and inspect restaurants. And again, that is a state regulation that's based on probably the FDA model food code. But I think it became pretty clear in this case that it was either the burgers or it was the onions. And if it had been the burgers, it would have been USDA Food Safety Inspection Service tracing back to the burger fabrication facilities. And since it was onions, then it became FDA and it got traced back to that slicing facility and then perhaps back to the field as well.

So I think there's some 50 million people a year roughly, that have some sort of foodborne illness. The vast majority of them like... You kind of got sick. You know, you're not even sure where you got it. How does an investigation unfold or is it people who end up in the hospital that then get reported?

Well, so certainly different levels of illness send different signals. Right. So if somebody dies, well, that's a pretty serious consequence. And there's going to be, you know, some sort of an autopsy probably if it looked like it was really related to some sort of infectious disease. So we're going to know the most about the people that died.

We're going to know the next most about the people that were hospitalized because these are people that are really sick. Maybe the doctors ordered to stool culture, something like that. And then people that maybe just go to the E.R. and are discharged or see their GP and get some antibiotics or something. Those would be another level.

But really, in terms of this whole genome sequencing and being able to link these cases, you can't link the cases unless you have the organism and you can't get the organism unless you do a stool culture, right? And so really, if they only have mild foodborne disease, the doctors are not going to order a stool culture. And so it's never going to show up on the CDC's radar. But the CDC does publish these data that say that we estimate, you know, X number of cases a year and that those are based on the actual cases. And then they have some underreporting factors that they figure, okay, for every you know, I'm just making this up, every 20 people that go to the doctor, one gets a stool culture or something like that.

There's a lot of pathogens out there that sort of drive these recalls, these outbreaks. But I'd like to focus on the ones that I think people have heard about listeria. You mentioned E.coli, salmonella. Can you explain what these are? You know, just for somebody who has no microbiology background whatsoever, what are these?

So let's talk about listeria first. Listeria is quite different than salmonella and E coli. Listeria is what I like to describe as a high dose pathogen. So if I were to give you a single cell of listeria and me a single cell of listeria, we would probably be fine. Right? We could probably even find a million people to give a single cell of listeria, too. And most of those million people would be fine and would wake up the next day or several days later and not be sick at all, even if you're susceptible. Right. Even if you're immunocompromised or a pregnant woman or a small child or elderly, your chance of getting listeria from a single cell is vanishingly small. You really need to have really high levels, millions and millions of listeria bacteria. And that's probably what happened with Boar's Head, right? These the product came out of the plant contaminated. The other thing that's that's unique about listeria. different from other pathogens is that it's psycrhotrophic, which is just a fancy way of saying it grows in the cold. And so if you have a Board's Head liverwurst in your fridge and there's some listeria in it and your fridge is set at a good temperature, but you keep that product around for weeks on end... slowly, gradually, over time, listeria is growing in that product, and that will eventually lead to doses that can make people sick. We also don't know. I mean, it may have come out of the plant contaminated at a very high level. So, again, meat plants are refrigerated to control odor and to control bacterial growth. But listeria, like I said, likes it in the cold, or at least doesn't mind it in the cold and can still grow. So that's listeria. Very different organism, very hard to control in the food processing plant environment.

Listeria. What's the most common types of foods in deli meats then? Are they the most?

'Yeah. So listeria has been linked to deli meats, although the process deli meat industry, the kind of the pre-sliced deli meats that you see in the supermarkets these days, those are probably less risky because of some regulatory changes that USDA put in place. The ones that are sliced that retail, it's maybe not not as safe. And then you have the whole cross-contamination retail environment coming into play there. Certainly, listeria has been associated with raw milk. It's been associated with raw milk cheeses. It's been associated with cut and sliced melons. So so those are some of the foods that have been linked to listeria in the past.

Other common culprits for listeria include smoked fish and raw or lightly cooked sprouts. And then, of course, there's E.coli and salmonella, which you've no doubt heard about.

So let's transition now and talk about E coli and salmonella. These two organisms are more like each other. They are enteric pathogens. You know, we all have generic E coli in our intestines if we have a healthy gut. And that's just a normal thing.

So generally speaking, we think of e coli and salmonella as being associated with fecal contamination from animals. And so you could have eggs that are contaminated when the chicken lays them. You have, pathogenic E. Coli in the intestines of cows. Maybe you have salmonella in the feces of birds that are flying over a field that's, let's say, growing onions, for example. But we also know that those organisms, E. coli and salmonella can also just end up as environmental contaminants if conditions are right. And then the food products that those have been associated with are quite diverse.

Salmonella has been linked to various nut products, to peanut butter, to almonds, to fresh fruits and vegetables, basically, you name it. Both salmonella and E. Coli have both been associated with flour. And so we know, you know, people shouldn't eat raw cookie dough. We used to say because of the eggs. But now it may be because of the flour as well. And E. Coli has been linked to, you know, beef and beef products., famously, the Jack in the Box outbreak is where E. Coli sort of popped into everyone's common consciousness. But it's also been linked to leafy greens, been linked to flour, undercooked meat, a variety of food products.

Does the food taste different if it's been contaminated?

You know, people... This is so... Just like people get confused about recalls and outbreaks, people get confused about food safety and food spoilage. Food is spoiled when it doesn't taste good and it might not taste good because of chemical reactions in the food. But if you have a food that hangs around in your refrigerator for too long, meat can get a slime layer on it.

So you can get these off flavor formations and smells and tastes and colors and just grossness. And that's from bacteria that cause food to spoil. That food may be disgusting. It may be stomach churning, but it won't physically make you sick. It might mentally and mentally gross you out, but it won't physically make you sick versus things, again, like salmonella and E. coli. You know, if you have 10,000, 100,000 bacteria, that's not enough. Really. If they grew to really high numbers, they might actually spoil the food. But the levels that we need to make us sick are usually well below the levels needed for spoilage. And so there's going to be no visual indication that the food is unsafe.

Up next, we're going to take a close look at what might have gone wrong with the McDonald's slivered onions outbreak. Also, real tips on what you can do to protect yourself from foodborne illness. It's probably easier than you might think. We'll be right back.

When you look at the McDonald's Taylor Farms example, was it the onions themselves? Was it the facility that slivered the onions? Was it somewhere else? And I guess it gets at this question of how in where does food get contaminated?

Yeah. The short answer with the slivered onions is we don't know, right. And so we know that it probably was not anything that happened at McDonald's because it happened at multiple McDonald's or probably the temperature control of those slivered onions in the McDonald's was fine.

'We don't know about what kind of temperature control and what kind of cross-contamination and cleaning protocols they have in place at the slicing operation. We just don't know that. We will probably learn that eventually because of FDA investigations and because of lawsuits. We also don't know in the case of the onions where the onions got contaminated. It's possible that a small bit of onions came in contaminated from the field and then that contamination spread throughout the plant and that caused the problem.

It's also possible that a load of onions were contaminated in the field and the slicing operation did everything just fine. But because they didn't have a cooking step, they just passed that contamination along. And very often when we have outbreaks, it's often what we think of as a perfect storm scenario. So it's not just one thing going wrong. It's like three things going wrong all at the same time, and that's what leads to the outbreak. But in the case of the items, we just simply don't know. And we will hopefully, eventually know. We may never know, but we'll have maybe some better ideas about, you know, again, what went wrong, if anything, at the plant, what went wrong, if anything, in the field. And that will hopefully help us do a better job in the future.

I did a documentary years ago after the spinach outbreaks, and it really struck me the number of steps that take place between the food being grown and actually ending up on your table, which probably isn't a surprise to people who think about it, but it's grown in the fields. There's environmental factors, there's temperature and storage factors, there's processing and handling factors, supply chain sort of factors. Is there a lesson in there for you? I mean, do you shop differently? Do you do you go to farmer's markets more likely than buying at big grocery stores?

It's an interesting question. And I'll say too, you know, I delegate the shopping responsibilities to my wife and she'll go to her favorite supermarket or her second favorite supermarket or maybe a farmer's market as it suits her. So certainly your point about multiple steps leading to multiple places where problems can occur is a valid comment. The counter to that, though, is, well, would you rather trust a small farmer who maybe doesn't have any PhDs or food safety scientists on staff? Or would you rather trust a big company that has a lot of experts that are focusing on that? And so certainly I think if people want to shop locally, that's a great thing. It's a great thing for reasons besides food safety. If people want to get to know their local farmer and patronize their local farmer, these are all wonderful things to do for a variety of reasons, not necessarily for food safety.

You know, you sort of alluded to this earlier, Doctor, but this idea that, for example, the Boar's Head facility had inspections going on all the time, you said, and yet still had this outbreak. What is the listener to take away from that? Are the inspections not good enough? Should they have been able to prevent something like this?

That is a great question and that is probably a question for USDA. And that's, I guess, not for me. But yeah, I wonder I wonder what the responsibilities would have been for the inspectors. I wonder if reports made their way up to higher levels within USDA Food Safety Inspection Service. I wonder what changes maybe the agency is looking at right now because of that. And so the short answer is we just don't know.

What we do know from Freedom of Information Act requests that were served on that facility, that there were a lot of problems for a long time, a year or two leading up to this outbreak. What we don't know is we don't know how typical this plant was for plants that are doing this kind of work, because, again, without filing Freedom of Information Act requests, we don't know that information. I served on a National Academy of Sciences panel a number of years ago about the possibility of making because, again, we're taxpayers. We're paying these regulators to go out and collect this data. You could make the argument that we as taxpayers should have access to this information. And so if we had access to inspection results from food plants all over the country. Well, investigative reporters could look at those data and look for trans people like me, could benchmark the Boar's Head plant versus other plants that are making similar products. And we could figure out, was this plant a bad actor or were they just typical and they just had some bad luck. So...

You know, given what you know, is there legislation that you would advocate for to make our food supply safer?

What I would say is I would like to see more resources for inspection. I think it's it's terrible that USDA plants are continuously inspected and FDA has the resources needed to inspect plants once a year. I think that to me, just on the face of it, just doesn't make sense, right.

Of course, people in the food industry would say, well, you know, if you think about it, really, ultimately you can't rely on inspection to make things safe. It's really up to the company to do the right thing, right. And so the company really needs to step up and they need to have the best science and really care about food safety. And I don't think I'm smart enough to know what changes I'd like to see in the regulations. I would say I would like to see more emphasis on science and let's try to make decisions that are based on the science rather than based on somebody's opinion. So I'm for science based regulations, and I'd like to see more good science and more regulations that are based on good science.

I'd love to get some of your tips, especially going into the holidays, about food preparation. And if you if you really are listening and you really want to know about food recalls, we certainly as a news organization, report them in the news when they're happening. But if you wanted to stay sort of on top of things on your own, is there a way to do that? I mean, how do you do it?

Yeah, there are websites that you can subscribe to to give you information about recalls, you know, on the FDA side and on the USDA side as well. For a number of years I subscribed to those. It can kind of get overwhelming because there's probably a recall for something going on every day.

Interesting.

So I would say for the most part, the system works pretty well and the individual consumers don't need to be aware. Another thing that's good is shopper loyalty program. So we know that all the big chains you have a key tag or you have a number or phone number or something. And you know, that loyalty program also tracks the foods that you buy so they can offer you coupons on the things that you buy a lot. But we have had examples where certain foods have been recalled. And through the shopper loyalty program, the chains have been able to go out and talk to those consumers and say, Hey, you have a bag of flour in your pantry right now. That was part of a recall. But yeah, short of subscribing to these services and trying to not get overwhelmed with the number of minor recalls that we see on a regular basis, that's probably a good step.

Well, hopefully, again, you know, 50 million people roughly every year get some sort of foodborne illness but don't want to sort of panic people. Most of those people, the vast majority, don't even get sick enough to go to the hospital. But...

Right, and I would say to, you know, a good, good friend of mine used to say that the risks of not eating still outweigh the risks of eating, right. We all we all have to eat every day. And most of us eat foods every day and we don't get sick, right. It's a rare event when we do get sick. And of course, it's a tragedy if people are hospitalized or die. But for the most part, we can trust the food and the water that we consume is safe most of the time.

I read a study that said most of the food borne illnesses are coming from outside the home. People eating at these buffets. We're talking about a delis or restaurants, things like that. And we've talked about the regulation that's in place to try and curb how often that's likely to happen. But what about in the home? What do you do? What is good kitchen sort of hygiene, if you will, with regard to trying to minimize these illnesses?

Sure. Well, before we talk about kitchen hygiene, I do want to come back to this idea of where most food borne disease happens. And part of the problem is, if you do make people in your home sick, you're probably not going to report yourself to the local health department, right.

'And so I think that food borne disease in the home probably is under-reported just because it's a small number of people, right. But when you're preparing food in your home, there's a number of things you can do. Obviously, pay attention when you're shopping about what you buy. My wife does a lot of baking, and so she buys flour on a regular basis. But one of the things that she does now is she transfers that flour from the paper sack, that it comes from the grocery store into a plastic container for better shelf life. But she also cuts out the product information, the product type and the date code and the lot code. And she sticks that on the plastic container so that she does know in the case of a recall whether that flour is implicated or not. I think one thing that everybody should do is invest in a good tip sensitive digital thermometer. We have one that I use on a regular basis just for heating leftovers, right.

'But you can also use it for cooking beef or, you know, meat or chicken or checking the temperature of casseroles and things like that. It's a great tool. I would say the second thing that people should do is they should know the temperature of their home refrigerator. Modern refrigerators come with a button you can push, but if you have a less modern one or you want a double checked, go and buy it. Inexpensive refrigerator thermometer. That refrigerator thermometer will enable you to know that your temperature of your refrigerator is 41 degrees or less, which is what it should be. And we studied handwashing in my laboratory. Handwashing is a good intervention because most of the time we don't have pathogens on our hands. But of course, washing your hands is a good idea. I would say pay attention to cross-contamination, right? If you're going to cut raw meat or poultry on a cutting board. Realize that now that cutting board is contaminated with E coli, salmonella, campylobacter, you know, could be tampered with a variety of organisms. And so you want to clean and sanitize that cutting board before you use it for something like a salad that's not going to be cooked.

Let me do a little lightning round with you just again, coming up with for the holidays here. Chicken... Need to be washed in the sink?

'Really bad idea to wash chicken in your sink. Again, like hand-washing. You're not going to wash all of the bacteria off what you are going to do. A pretty good job of doing is spreading those bacteria around your kitchen to places that might be hard to clean. So definitely don't wash your chicken. If you are concerned about that chicken juice, you can carefully drain it into your sink or you can carefully pour it into your trash can. But don't wash your chicken, please.

Triple washed greens. Seems like that's been washed enough. Should another washing happen?

So there was an expert report that came out a number of years ago written by some friends and colleagues of mine and they recommend not washing things that have been triple washed. Again, probably it's already as clean as it's going to get. One more wash is not going to make any difference. And if you don't know what you're doing, you can actually possibly increase the contamination. And I'll also say with with some foods like fresh berries, maybe just wash them before you're ready to eat them. Don't wash them before putting them into your fridge because that can add the moisture content and that can lead to mold and other kinds of spoilage.

Will you always wash an apple before you eat it?

I have to confess I am not a fastidious apple washer. I will... I will certainly rinse apples under the tap. Another thing that we should probably caution people against doing is realize that soap is for hands, right? Soap is not for washing fresh fruits and vegetables. If you want to buy a specially formulated fruit and vegetable wash, by all means do that. Many of the ones that are out there on the market have not actually been tested to remove bacteria. But if it makes you feel better and you've got the money to spend on it, I say there's no harm in that. But definitely don't be washing fruits and vegetables with hand soap or dish soap.

You're doing a big Thanksgiving spread and everyone sitting around eating. How long can that spread of food stay out before it needs to be put away in the fridge?

That's an excellent question. And we do see an uptick in certain kinds of food borne disease around the holidays because of foods being left out or, you know, have a big spread and then people bring food and then the people realize they don't have enough room in their refrigerator for things. And so the general rule of thumb that we tell people is you really need to get it back in the refrigerator in two hours or less. And then another tip, too, is don't overfill those containers. We've been doing some research around cooling and safe cooling. And the recommendation that we have is make sure that when you put the food into the fridge, the depth of the food is two inches or less. And you may say, well, Sanjay, I don't know how much two inches is. Well... Just imagine a credit card turned on its side. That's about two inches. So don't fill the food any deeper than that. And the other thing you can do is don't cover the food tightly because that's going to trap heat. You can cover it loosely or just leave it on covered until it cools down.

Again, these are great tips. I just love the practicality of this. You know, part of the reason we wanted to talk to you again going into the holidays, because I think a lot of the headlines have been around these food outbreaks and people may be more worried than they than they are typically. Should they be?

'That's a great question. I don't like to tell people how to feel or how much to worry about something. What I can tell you is that I am going to enjoy the holidays and I am not going to worry. I'm going to pay attention. I'm going to make sure that the place where we're having Thanksgiving with my in-laws, that they use a thermometer to check the temperature of the turkey. And and then when we go to visit my family later, I'm going to ask the same questions. Well, how long is this left been out and where did this come from? How did you handle it? But I'm mostly just going to relax and try to have fun with family.

You know, I got to say, I feel pretty lucky that Dr. Schaffner was able to join us for this episode. He's such a knowledgeable guy, a food safety expert, obviously, but also very thoughtful, very clear and very measured. We just don't need more panic nowadays. It is easy to think of food recalls as something that happens to other people, but the truth is it can affect anyone. And while that in and of itself might feel unsettling, the good news again, is that we do have the ability to navigate what we eat with more confidence and more care. And as Dr. Schaffner said, it doesn't have to be that complicated. You need to practice simple habits like washing your hands and preparing food properly. I, for one, will never wash that chicken in the sink again. It's not about being perfect, though. It's about being mindful.

All right. Up next, our segment On Call. I get to be on call and answer one of your questions. We'll be right back.

All right. Now it's time to answer a question from one of you. Debbie wrote in to ask about an old wives tale that says that you should stay away from seafood in any month without an R in it. She said on the four occasions that she did not follow this rule, she got sick every time. And she wants to know if there's any proof behind the rule. Well, Debbie, first of all, the old wives tale did refer to oysters specifically, not all seafood, and that you should only eat them in months containing the letter R, So that means only from September to April. Why is that? As you might guess, those are the colder weather months, at least in the northern hemisphere.

Now, this is a rule or an old wives tale, I guess, that goes back some 4000 years, according to researchers who were able to date oyster harvesting off the coast of Georgia to those cooler months. Now, the rule probably made a lot of sense in the days before refrigeration. But now, thanks to our modern technology and food safety regulations, wild oysters are something that you can safely consume year round. According to the former chief sanatarian with the Louisiana Department of Health, this rule is now a bit antiquated. He explained that when oysters are extracted from the water, they are exposed to higher temperatures that allow potentially hazardous pathogens to grow. And back in the day, fishermen had to rely on months with an R because air and water temperatures were cooler.

But with more readily available refrigeration, he said that oysters can be safely harvested and sold now any time. One thing I do want to point out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is that you can get very sick from eating raw oysters. And the only way to really, truly kill harmful bacteria is to cook them properly. But the point being that you can get sick from eating raw or undercooked oysters during any month of the year. And in case you're wondering, one of the most common infections associated with raw oysters is not listeria. It's not E coli. It's not even salmonella. It's another bacterium called Vibrio. So, Debbie, I hope that helps you enjoy your seafood with more confidence.

'And if you have a question for me, anybody I want to know. Record a voice memo. Email it to ask sanjay@cnn.com or give us a call. (470) 396-0832 and leave a message.

Alright. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening, as always. And, of course, keep chasing life. We'll see you next Friday. Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Eryn Mathewson, Jennifer Lai, Grace Walker and Jesse Remedios. Andrea Kane is our medical writer. Our senior producer is Dan Bloom. Amanda Sealy is our showrunner. Dan Dzula is our technical director and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig. With support from Jamus Andrest, Jon Dianora, Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Leni Steinhardt, Nichole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Ben Tinker and Nadia Kounang of CNN Health and Katie Hinman.