If you eat spoiled food, and don’t feel symptoms for a week, is it more probable that your body simply killed off the germs or that you did get symptom-less food poisoning? Doesn’t seem that your body would let spoiled food go through your system without doing something about it.
Many food borne illnesses incubation times of 3 to 5 days. Even fast acting ones are 12+ hours. If you react to something you eat very quickly its more likely some kind of allergy/sensitivity as opposed to infection.
There are a very few exceptions. The ‘emetic’ form is commonly caused by rice cooked for a time and temperature insufficient to kill any spores present, then improperly refrigerated. It can produce a toxin, cereulide, which is not inactivated by later reheating. This form leads to nausea and vomiting one to five hours after consumption.
I know this only from unfortunate first-hand experience. I was leaning over a toilet in less than two hours after the meal and couldn’t even think of touching chicken fried rice for three year afterwards ;).
Not all spoiled food will make you sick. It really depends on what is in it, and how much is in it. It can be spoiled, but there just isn’t enough bacteria to make you sick.
When there’s a bowl of something like dip, and some people get violently ill, some people get a little queasy, and some people don’t get sick at all, it’s a function of several things, but the main ones are these:
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the bacteria may not be spread evenly through the food. The bite you ate was bacteria-free, and the bite someone else ate was teeming with them;
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some people eat more of the questionable food than other people do, and get more of the bacteria;
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everything else you eat is important. If you eat a lot of other food, particularly if you drink a lot of non-alcoholic fluid (alcohol contributes to dehydration and nausea), you can spare yourself a lot of misery, and if you eat a lot of other food, whatever it is, that dilutes the poisoned food.
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Everyone’s gut flora is different, and some people may handle the assault better than others.
That list goes from most to least important.
So, what do you mean by poisoned? Most people would say, if you didn’t have symptoms, you weren’t poisoned. I suppose there are people who would say "If you consumed poisonous bacteria, you were poisoned, even if you had no symptoms. So, pick your definition. I go with the former, but if you prefer the latter, then yes, there is “symptom-less food poisoning.”
Only the latter makes any sense. Tour your hair then put your finger in your mouth; you just got ‘poisoned’ by Staphylococcus. Eat a ‘5 second rule’ cookie that fell on an outdoor picnic table where birds have been; you just got salmonella. Touch pretty much any object that hasn’t recently been sterilised and you got Clostridium perfringens. In all of these cases, nothing bad happens to a normal healthy person.
Not a day goes by that we don’t ingest small doses of some nasty pathogen or other. Food poisoning occurs only when the dose is sufficiently high to overwhelm our defences.
When it comes to eating food containing illness-causing bacteria, wouldn’t drinking alcohol be a good thing? That is, wouldn’t the alcohol kill some or all of the bacteria?
Come to think of it, how often is it that cause of food poisoning is the bacteria itself rather than the accumulated toxins they excreted? I have read, for example, that in adults, there’s little risk in consuming the bacteria associated with botulism, because it rarely colonizes the gut. Rather, botulism occurs when eating food into which the bacteria have already introduced the botulinum toxin; the spores need not still be present.
Arsenic in your food will just kill you. (It was used as a colouring in the early 19th century.)
There is evidence for that only for some types of pathogen, and it’s far from 100% protection.
Some pathogens poison your food, some infect your tissues, some colonise your gut and poison you from the inside.
When a pathogen (bacteria, virus, mold, worm) gets inside you, you are infected; you have an infection, but you may or may not have symptoms.
When your body’s cells become damaged due to the presence of the pathogen inside you, you have a disease; you have symptoms.
You can, if you’re lucky, be infected with the bacteria salmonella, yet not develop the disease salmonellosis (diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps due to an infection with salmonella).
Infection without disease probably happens more often than you think. We are constantly being infected with pathogens, and most of the time, our body’s immune system fights them off before they can cause disease.
I would expect that most organisms that can survive stomach acid could also survive diluted ethanol (probably in both cases by forming tough spore coatings until the offending chemical is gone).
For most any infectious disease, the size of the inoculum (number of infectious particles) will influence who gets sick.
In scombroid food poisoning (eating fish that was improperly/insufficiently refrigerated), the allergic-type symptoms are due to histamine buildup in the fish. If you get only a small dose and don’t have a medical condition predisposing to problems (like asthma), symptoms may be very mild to non-existent.
people have been eating questionable foods forever. Your body has some sophisticated defense mechanisms against them. In fact, most of the symptoms of food poisoning-vomiting, diarrhea-are your body doing something about it. If your body managed to kill whatever you ingested via stomach acid, immune system, and a robust intestinal flora, it doesn’t activate the more extreme measures.