For anyone celebrating a birthday today, be aware that when you blow out the candles on your cake, you’re really grossing it up. A recent study shows a massive increase in bacteria on cakes following this common ritual. Fortunately, this increase is clearly fairly unimportant, even if it is a bit stomach-churning.
The experiments themselves also sound like a college student’s dream:
To simplify things for the study, Dawson and his students dispensed with an actual cake and frosted a piece of foil atop a cake-shaped styrofoam base. His students stuck candles in, lit them, and blew. Oh actually, they did something before blowing out the candles: They ate pizza. “We also wanted to simulate a birthday party,” says Dawson. “We thought it might help the salivary glands get going.”
