Did anyone see the video on Foxnews.com about the quality (or lack of) of drinking water in restaurants?
Toilet water was the word they used. Ice machines are disgusting. I know someone who always orders drinks at restaurants without ice and never drinks the water, now I know why.

For the most part, unless you're ordering a bottled/canned drink, you're getting something made with the restaurant water. Fountain soda, ice tea, coffee... all restaurant water beverages.

Not to mention stuff like water added to soup, the water your pasta is boiled in, etc.

I like to order bottled water if I can. I also heard somewhere (not sure if it's an urban legend or not) that lemon juice can kill some bacteria, so I usually squeeze a lemon into restaurant water.

Or sometimes I just order beer or wine. That pretty much solves the problem.

Although honestly, I'm more worried about what the staff does to my food rather than the water quality. Anyone seen "Waiting" yet?

I worked in a lot of restaurants when I was younger--most of my friends did, too. Lemme tell ya... the stuff that goes on behind the scenes. Ugly. Just ugly. I hate thinking about it, because it makes me want to never eat out again.

Actually it just the ice not all the water. The Ice machines NEVER get cleaned out.

Think about it: the water came from the same place - the public water line. In the case of the ice, it sat in the ice machine being frozen, and was then dumped into the holding tank before being sampled. In the case of the toilet water, it was sampled basically fresh from the tap. The results are not at all surprising. Unless the bacterial levels are so high as to be considered patently unsafe, the simple fact that they were higher is not cause for any concern at all.

It kills me what ignorant non-scientists will get all freaked out over.

There already tends to be alot of bacteria in the water in rural areas anyway. Fertilizers and stuff. But, it is tested (well, I'm assume it is!) and has to be within a safe level for drinking.

I've been a little freaked about all these horror stories about food and water, but seems I have amnesia whenever I get near a restaurant. It all smells and looks so good, I forget all about......what was it now??

Yeah, me, too. Although, I admit, I rarely send a dish back, even if it's wrong. I'll either eat it wrong, or not eat it at all. Most cooks/restaurant staff are decent folks (I never once spit in anyone's food during the years I worked as a server), but there's always that one jerk who decides to wipe his, ah, unmentionables all over your burger. Ick.

Skip the water and order a beer then you have no worries.

Oh, Peacefrog,

You just upped my alert level to yellow! I guess my imagination never got as far as someone's unmentionables! Yuck! Do I dare ask what can one get from eating an unmentionable burger??

Well, I doubt you'll actually "catch" any type of disease. But I, for one, will pass on the special "testicular sauce." LOL

I didn't catch the report on this at all, but I think the problem is when the news broadcasts something like this, us "non-scientific" people tend to believe it's really bad for them. We tend to trust reporters and the news to let us know what's good and bad for us, and not look into the subject further.

Actually the story was about a high school student who compared the quality of restaurant ice with the water in their toilets. 80% of the restaurants have less bacteria, etc in the toilet water than in the ice.

The girl won the science fair and had several of the restaurants ask her to come back and re-test after they had made procedural changes to their cleaning regimen.

Wow, good for her!

Those results are pretty gross!

It kind of makes sense. Most commercial toilets have a disinfecting solution automatically injected on each flush, but how often do you think they clean the ice machine? I have see workers put their soda bottles and lunch babs right in with the ice.

Do you really want them adding disinfectant to your ice? That's one way they could solve the problem, but totally unnecesary and like I said, the results of the kid's study are completely logical and not necessarily cause for any alarm at all unless the level of bacteria exceeded established water quality standards, which I don't think they did or the restaurants would've been shut down immediately.

This is a classic example of the media making a huge deal out of nothing. The kid should really do a follow-up science project next on public hysteria and media misuse of scientific data for fear-mongering. Should win a prize for it too, because this really is classic!

Not so sure about that. I doubt the health department would have taken a high school kid's science project as truth/fact... they probably would have had to do their own tests and investigation before shutting down a restaurant.

And if the restaurant got things cleaned up before the health department got wind of it, well... I'm guessing the restaurant wouldn't have gotten shut down, even if the levels of bacteria had exceeded standards at one point in time.

Well if you want to refute me, use facts: post the results of the study. You do that, and I will look up the EPA drinking water standards, and we can all see for ourselves. If the bacteria levels were truly unsafe the media would've been all over that.

P.S. - If you cleaned your toilet as frequently as most restaurants do, I'd bet a test in your home would show the same results. Unless you sterilize your ice cube trays, your ice has more bacteria than the water coming out of the tap into your toilet.

Um, I'm not trying to be antagonistic, B. Nor am I "refuting" you. I'm simply saying that the Health Dept isn't going to shut down a restaurant without doing their own investigation. Period. I have no idea if the levels were 'unsafe,' nor do I care. Like I mentioned before, there's plenty of unsafe, unsanitary, downright disgusting things that go on in restaurants. The drinking water is the last thing I'd be concerned about.

Did any of you even watch the FOX video? The student was only allowed to take the samples if the restaurants identity remained anonymous. How is the Health depart. going to shut down an anonymous business? There was also no mention of any code violations. It was a simple comparison: toilet water was cleaner than ice.

You people ae too stupid for words. No wonder so many people get scammed so often.

I don't suppose the actual bacterial counts are published anywhere?

You folks would be shocked at the number of bacteria residing in your own mouths - if you knew, I dare say you'd take up drooling rather than swallow your own spit.

Had a bad day today, didn't cha, BMIC??

Too many idiots - they're driving me nuts.

Read again B! It was not a study. It was a HS science Fair.
"It was a simple comparision- Restaurant water is dirtier than toliet water"

(edited to remove name calling)

For anyone interested, here's an article published at KidsNewsRoom.org about it:

Science Project: Ice Dirtier Than Toilets by Patricia Daniels

If you have ever hesitated to use the toilet in a fast-food restaurant because it looks filthy, you now have something new to worry about. A middle-school student from Tampa, Florida, made a troubling discovery about some fast-food restaurants in her area--she found that the ice from the restaurants was dirtier than the toilet water.

For her science project, twelve-year-old Jasmine Roberts collected ice samples from five fast-food restaurants in South Florida, from both inside the restaurant and the drive-thru windows. She then collected toilet water samples from the same restaurants, placing those and the ice samples into sterile containers. Jasmine, who volunteers with a professor at the University of Southern Florida, took the specimens to the university and tested them for bacteria.

The results might just convince you to order your next drink without ice. Jasmine found that in four out of five restaurants, the number of bacteria in the ice surpassed that in the toilet water. In three of those cases, the ice tested positive for E. coli bacteria, a germ that comes from human waste, and which can cause intestinal illnesses.

Jasmine has a theory that the ice is dirtier because people use unwashed hands to scoop the ice out, and the machines are not cleaned very often. Toilets, on the other hand, are supplied with sanitized city water, and are usually cleaned daily.

The amateur scientist did reveal her test results to the restaurants involved. Several of the restaurant managers have told Jasmine that they plan on making improvements in their ice machine sanitation.

We have one of those water cooler things at work, the ones that take the 5 gallon bottles. I don't get water from it, because the nozzles are never cleaned or disinfected. No one get's sick from it, and I'm not one of those obsessive/compulsive clean freaks, but it just bothers me.

I have to admire the girl though, it was an interesting piece of research. And for E. Coli to show up, well that's just disgusting.

What strain of E. coli was it? The ONE strain that causes illness, or one of the myriad that are totally harmless?


CPD the kid had to have measured the amount of bacteria in some quantitative fashion. The article talks about "the NUMBER of bacteria" in the samples. All I am saying is I would like to see those numbers. It was a Science fair project = a scientific experiment. There's data - I'm just asking to see it. How freakin' hard is THAT to understand?

P.S. That paricular article wasn't the best I've seen. They don't mention her sampling methodology. I read elsewhere that she first flushed the toilet and collected her sample upon flushng it again, as the fresh water entered the bowl. You couldn't ask for more pristine toilet water samples unlesss she had drilled into the water line before it entered the toilet at all. On the other hand, the ice samples were taken from the machines' holding bin, where it had sat for some time after freezing and being dumped into the bin by the machine. It's not like she took the toilet water samples in whatever state she found them in at the moment that she first walked into the bathroom and just dipped it out of the bowl.

All I am saying is that the relative numbers don't mean a whole lot and nobody should be at all surprised that there were higher numbers in the ice than in the water fresh from the tap. What would be newsworthy would be if there were quantititive data that showed the bacteria levels in the ice approached or even exceeded EPA drinking water quality standards. If they didn't, then nobody should care either way, except for those trying to make a quick buck off of sensationalist reporting.