FDA Warns: Wash Your Avocado!

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has stunned guac lovers everywhere by urging the public to thoroughly wash the peel on their avocado, even though no one’s going to eat it.

This month, the federal agency announced that investigators’ sampling found Listeria monocytogenes on the peels of about one in every five avocados. Over the course of a two-year study, researchers found that almost 18% of all avocados tested, both domestic and imported, had listeria on the skins.

Listeriosis symptoms include high fever, severe headache, stiffness, nausea, abdominal pain and diarrhea, and in pregnant women, the infection can cause miscarriages and stillbirths, the FDA said.

About 1,600 people get listeriosis each year and approximately 260 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Pregnant women, newborns, adults ages 65 or older and people with weak immune systems are most likely to be affected.

According to the FDA, the very way people eat avocados — scooping out the inside part out of the soon-to-tossed peel before eating it as well as consuming the avocado very soon after cutting it open — helps reduces the risk of getting a foodborne illness.  However, to prevent the dirt and bacteria from hop scotching from the skin to your knife or spoon to the fleshy part of the avocado that you’re going to ingest, the FDA recommends you scrub the peel and dry it with a clean towel or paper towel.

William Hallman, a human ecology professor at Rutgers University, pointed out that likely very little listeria would be transferred from the skin to the flesh of the avocado but called the FDA suggestion “good advice.”

“Even though the risk is relatively small, you can reduce it to virtually nonexistent,” he said. “There are many more dangerous things you can do than not wash an avocado, but having said that, the rate at which the FDA found listeria on avocados was a fair amount.”

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