What Would Happen If You Ate Moldy Bread?
THE SPORE YOU KNOW
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​​This is What Would Happen If, a close examination of mundane hypothetical situations. Each week, we look at something that you could do but probably never would, and take it to its logical endpoint. This week: What would happen if you ate a slice of moldy bread?

Mold strikes when you least expect, but in reality, you probably should have. Unlike rotten food it doesn't smell. It chills on top, mocking you for not eating the thing it's occupying sooner — a blemish on an otherwise perfectly fine loaf of bread.

Such is the borderline innocuousness of mold that you've most likely, at some point in your life, considered your options. Maybe it's fine to eat? Maybe you'll just cut off the mold and then eat the rest? Maybe you accidentally ate some and now you're not sure if you should just finish that slice of moldy toast?

As with most things in life, there are no simple answers. Asking what would happen if you ate moldy bread is like asking what would happen if you drank pond water. It all depends on the pond you're drinking from.

Randy Worobo, a professor of food microbiology at Cornell, does not recommend that you eat moldy bread. This isn't because all mold is inherently toxic. It's because the mold in your bread could be many types of mold. Mold spores can come from anywhere, and unless you're a trained microbiologist like Worobo, it's pretty dang hard to determine the benign mold from the bad.

"You can have mold contamination from the baking facility, your own kitchen," says Worobo. "When you go into slicing off a piece of bread you go in multiple times. And every time you do that you expose the bread to mold spores that will ultimately grow and spoil the food."

You could eat a slice of moldy bread one time, and it might be fine. But that doesn't mean that moldy bread is just fine to eat all the time.

"Usually the risks are minimal," says Worobo. "We actually recommend that if it's moldy you throw it out just to be on the safe side."

But where's the fun in that? Let's assume you don't heed his advice.

In a worst case scenario, you eat a slice a bread inoculated with stachybotrys, a toxic house mold. This will, at the very least, mess with your respiratory system. "You can actually get irritations in the mouth, throat and nose," he says." "And if it's a high enough concentration you can actually go into shock, hemorrhaging or necrosis."

In a second scenario, the mold infesting your bread is actually one of the "good" molds that produces an antibiotic. "If you have a person who's allergic to antibiotics and the bread is contaminated with an antibiotic-producing strain of mold, you could have an allergic reaction," he says. Given the severity of the allergic reaction, symptoms could be as minor minor as itchy skin, or as severe as anaphylactic shock.

A third not-very-possible, but still-very-possible scenario involves you eating moldy bread on a regular basis. It doesn't phase you, you really don't feel like wasting bread, so you power on through. Here is where some of the long-term health risks of mold come into play. "Certain molds produce toxins, they're called mycotoxins," he says. "The thing is if you get a mycotoxigenic strain, they're primarily carcinogens." So, yes, in a way eating moldy bread could give you cancer. Tell all your friends.

You, of course, probably think yourself a mildly clever person. You can see where the mold is and isn't on a slice of bread. You can just cut the moldy bits out and avoid everything bad we just discussed, right? Wrong, Worobo says.

"You can see the colony of mold, because usually there's a coloration associated with it. What you can't see is the spread of mold," he says. "Mold spores are so light in color that once you see them the whole loaf of bread is now covered in spores."

If you are going to try and salvage a moldy slice or a loaf, Worobo strongly recommends you get aggressive with how much you cut out.

"Cut it out aggressively, if you really want to be a cheapskate," he says. "But bread is typically not that expensive."

Further Reading

Serious Eat's Guide To Making And Eating Bread

ESPN's Dive Into The NBA's Obsession With PB&J

The CDC's Guide To Mold

Next Week

What would happen if you stopped paying all of your bills?

Got a burning (hopefully not in an infected way) hypothetical question? Submit it to [email protected]. And for more, check out our What Would Happen If archive.

<p>Steve Rousseau is the Features Editor at Digg.&nbsp;</p>

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