Hi everybody this is Monica Reinagel the nutrition diva here with your quick and dirty

tips for eating well and feeling fabulous. Earlier this month hundreds of people were sickened and many died in an E.colae outbreak

that was eventually traced to some bean sprouts raised on an organic farm in Germany.

E. E. Colae outbreaks happen from time to time, of course, but this one was extra

scary because it involved a particularly virulent strain of E. coli, and it made the death toll

unusually high.

Once they identified the source of the outbreak, it was quickly contained,

but a lot of people are still nervous about eating raw vegetables.

And not surprisingly, there's a lot of advice circulating on the internet right now about

washing or soaking your vegetables in bleach, hydrogen peroxide, vinegar, iodine, or even dish soap.

Now, any of these methods can help remove surface dirt,

pesticide residues, bugs, and some germs.

For that matter, so can washing produce in plain tap water.

But are any of these methods a reliable way

to eliminate E. coli or other dangerous pathogens? To find out, I contacted the International

Food Information Council, which kindly put me in touch with Dr. Robert Brackett, the

director of the Institute for Food Safety and Health at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Dr Brackett had sobering news.

Although these sanitizing methods might make your produce slightly cleaner, none of them will make contaminated produce safe to eat.

Well that made me wonder whether these very toxic strains of E. coli might be especially hard to kill. And it turns out that they're really not that

invincible. They've just developed some very clever survival tactics. If these E. coli bacteria were just floating around in a bucket of water, a little

bleach or even some vinegar would kill them right away, Dr Brackett explains.

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