Bagged lettuce is a lot less healthy than you’d think!

Nice and easy, bagged lettuce from the supermarket. It saves you time cutting and washing and the portions are exactly right. And it’s still healthy! Or is it?

Salmonella

Research from the University of Leicester has shown that bagged lettuce is much less healthy than we previously thought. The juice from the broken leaves turns the lettuce into a breeding ground for salmonella! The salmonella grows about 24,000 times as fast because of these juices that come out of the broken leaves. The researchers came to this conclusion after studying bagged spinach, baby green oak, and other types of salads.

Bacteria

Apart from this worrying revelation, the researchers also found out these circumstances also make salmonella bacteria even stronger. So, this increases the chance of infection even more! This is why you should always immediately eat bagged lettuce, and definitely not put the open bag back into the fridge. Consume it as quickly as possible, otherwise the natural bacteria that grow on lettuce grow faster as well. Rinsing the lettuce doesn’t help: the salmonella attaches so strongly that the bacteria will end up back in the bag anyway.

Yikes, we’ll just buy a head of lettuce from now on! But, how to keep it fresh? That’s what you’ll read on page two.

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