Why you should eat bagged salads as soon as you open them

A study has revealed that bagged salads carry serious risk of salmonella and the longer the bags are kept, the higher the risk that the bacteria will appear. As if eating tossed vegetables wasn’t HARD ENOUGH, like, come ON!

Bagged salads may be an easy way to add necessary nutrients to your dinner, but it may also be an easy way to get sick, according to microbiologists at the University of Leicester in England. Broken salad leaves release juices into the bags of salad, providing the perfect environment for salmonella growth, and making the bacteria more likely to infect. Yikes.

“Salad leaves are cut during harvesting and we found that even microlitres of the juices (less than 1/200th of a teaspoon) which leach from the cut ends of the leaves enabled salmonella to grow in water, even when it was refrigerated,” Dr. Primrose Freestone, who led the study, explained.

These juices allowed the salmonella bacteria to attach itself to the leaves in a way that made it difficult to remove, even with “vigorous” washing. No, you aren’t the only one seriously creeped out by that visual.

The study also discovered that bacteria naturally present on the leaves in these bagged salads only grow faster when the bags are open.

If you’re a fan of a bagged salad (hello, convenience!), don’t worry and ban it from your grocery list just YET. The easiest way you can avoid getting sick from a bagged salad is just eating right away. Scientists recommend that you eat bagged salads ASAP once they’ve been opened, on the same day if you can.