Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Expert Guidelines

Re:Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Exper... by grumple on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @02:13PM (#26638163)

> If eating that pizza kills one in 100,000 though, you'd have no idea.

I'm going to guess this is wrong. I went to a large private university of around thirty thousand. I'd estimate, on any given week, the average student has eaten leftover pizza in the morning once. This alone puts us at a hundred and twenty thousand overnight pizzas consumed per month. Millions per year. At just one university! Surely we'd hear cautionary tales of overnight pizza at 1 in 100k or even 1 in a million, as deaths from it would be far more common than binge drinking.

My estimates may be off a bit, but probably not by as much as you'd think. Student organizations buy copious amounts of pizza because it's popular and cheap.

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Re:Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Exper... by InitialLastName on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @02:53PM (#26638742)

To offer a counterpoint, college students aren't exactly a randomly distributed sample. They're young adults who are (on average) in the prime of their lives from an immune response perspective, and self-select for a certain minimum level of health besides that. One would expect their responses to food-borne illness vectors to skew dramatically to the less severe side than the general population.

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Re:Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Exper... by allturtles on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @03:09PM (#26638973)

I'm fascinated by the assumption by many in this thread that eating pizza left out overnight is common. I've never done it, and I went to college. We had refrigerators. I mean, if you have a refrigerator why not put the pizza in there?

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Re:Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Exper... by HeyLaughingBoy on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @05:19PM (#26640693)

Same reason I often leave pizza out even though I'm years removed from college. Pizza box big, refrigerator small.

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Re:Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Exper... by cafard on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @04:55PM (#26640357)

I agree. If nothing else, a community of the young and hungry might mean that there never is any leftover pizza.

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Re:Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Exper... by grendix on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @03:14AM (#26644351)

It's cheese and cured meat and bread. If its covered I'm not too worried about it.

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Re:Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Exper... by weeblewobble on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @04:43PM (#26640179)

I think your estimates are way, way off. I doubt the average college student eats leftover pizza once a week, let alone pizza that's been left out all night.

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