Food Fictions: Is Margarine Better Than Butter?

April 22, 2005 — -- Is margarine healthier than butter? Is it safer to eat at home than at a restaurant? Can you eat seafood if you're pregnant? These days there's quite a bit of conflicting advice about eating right, and it turns out a lot of us buy into a lot of food myths. Are you putting any food fables on your table?

Here are a few of the 10 myths "20/20" tackled in "Food: Myths, Lies and Straight Talk:"

One of the more popular local news series is about germs, food poisoning and restaurants that can make you sick. But are you more likely to get food poisoning from a restaurant or in your own home?

"20/20" picked a random couple and asked if they'd ever had a bad experience in a restaurant or thought they'd ever gotten food poisoning. Their answer? Yes.

"I had probably the worst 48 hours of food poisoning in my life, to the point where I thought it was over. I said, 'That's it. My life is officially going to end any moment now,' " said Graig Weich.

Despite the horrible experience, Weich seemed resigned to the thought that there's a food-poisoning threat lurking in all restaurants. "The truth of the matter is, is that no matter how nice a restaurant is, you don't know what's going on in the kitchen," he said.

But that's a myth and nobody knows it better than Mark Nealon, a former health inspector who now works as a consultant. He's peeked into kitchen corners for 15 years, and he showed us what sorts of standards eating establishments are held to. And they're tough.

But what about our own kitchens? Nealon agreed to look at Weich and his girlfriend, Liga's, kitchen.

The peanut brittle they had left out was not a good idea. It's an invitation to bugs, Nealon said. He suggests putting food in a vermin-proof container after it's been removed from its original packaging.

He also noticed Weich's microwave oven smelled a little funky. "When in doubt, throw it out," Nealon advises.

Kitchen sponges, it turns out, are the No. 1 cause of food poisoning in the home.

Dr. Philip Tierno, the director of microbiology and immunology at the New York University School of Medicine, says if you get sick from food more than likely you have only yourself to blame. "In reality, 50 [percent] to 80 percent of gastrointestinal infections, food-borne illnesses are caught within the home," he said.