Finding Hairs In Food Is Disgusting – But Here’s What’ll Happen To Your Body If You Eat One

There are few things that have the ability to turn the stomach like finding hair in your partially eaten meal. It reflects badly on the hygiene of a restaurant. That’s why businesses go to great lengths to ensure their employees’ locks stay firmly on their person and not in your food.

In the U.S., guidelines advise that those involved in the preparation of food should wear suitable hair restraints. As outlined in the FDA Food Code, these include hats, baseball caps and hairnets. The aim of these head coverings is to catch loose strands, preventing them from finding their way onto customers’ plates.

Not only do hair restraints catch loose hairs, but they may also play a part in preventing kitchen staff from touching their manes and spreading contamination that way. However, you should keep your head covering in tip-top shape, ensuring that whatever you wear is in good condition and always clean.

With that in mind, single-use products such as disposable hairnets should be tossed away after wearing. They may need to be changed even more frequently if they develop a hole. So it’s important to make sure your head covering is performing as it should be to prevent strands from getting into food.

But it’s not just their hair on their heads that kitchen staff should keep under control. Facial fuzz like mustaches, beards, and goatees can also escape into food when left loose. As such, you can get specialized nets that cover the kisser and keep potentially dangerous contamination at bay.

Despite the FDA guidelines, though, there are no official requirements for hair restraints to be worn in kitchens. Speaking to Vice in 2018, food consultant and chef Jenny Dorsey revealed that in her experience of working in kitchens in New York City, guidelines were often poorly enforced. They were also confusing, with some Department of Health officials requiring a hairnet, while others accepted a baseball cap as a suitable covering.

What’s more, FDA guidelines on hair restraints do not apply to servers. That being said, it’s a good idea for waiting staff to keep long hair tied back to ensure strands can’t slip into food on the way from the kitchen to the customer. While this step might feel like overkill, when you consider most people who find hair in their food are unlikely to return, it makes good business sense to err on the side of caution.

Furthermore, because of the risks loose strands carry, if hair touches food while it’s being prepared or served, it should be discarded right away. If this happens in the kitchen, extra steps should be taken to clean surfaces, equipment and hands before starting to make the dish again.

Even if the hair hasn’t touched any food but has fallen onto equipment like dishes, cutting boards and utensils, it’s important to act to avoid contamination. The offending strand must be thrown away, and you should sanitize the affected surfaces. Servers and kitchen staff are also advised to wash their hands after touching their locks, even if it was just for a moment.

If the worse does happen, and a hair winds up in someones’ food leading to a complaint, there are some steps a restaurant can take to minimize the damage. According to the RMS Hospitality Group, an insurance program that specializes in restaurants, bars and nightclubs, there are a few ways to prevent any further issues and even potential legal risks.

A blog post published to the RMS Hospitality website in 2019 suggested that, first and foremost, restaurants should hear their customer’s complaints out. Letting them air their concerns in full gives the impression that you are taking the matter seriously. So wait until they’ve finished what they have to say before responding in a courteous and sincere way.

Another step that can be taken when a customer finds a hair in their food is to ask to see it. This should be done in a way so as not to make the complainant feel like they’re not being believed. With that in mind, offer to take the offending dish away from the table, or let a manager see it. That way, the consumer doesn’t have to look at the stomach-turning strand any longer.

With the hair-laden food out of sight, offer the customer a replacement meal. There’s a chance that the contaminant will have put them off their food. So if they refuse a new dish, try to come up with an alternative solution to the problem, one that suits the diner’s expectations. This brings us to the next point…

Ultimately, the best way to deal with wayward hair is to remember that the customer is always right. No matter how strenuous your hygiene practices are, mistakes can still happen. So it’s best to be apologetic about such a complaint, rather than fight your restaurant’s corner. Such an approach is only likely to make the situation worse.

Knowing what to do in the case of a stray hair being served up is a good plan for restaurants because they are one of the most common hazards in terms of food safety. It’s classified as a kind of physical contaminant, along with items such as plastic, stones, bones and jewelry. These kinds of foreign matter can be laden with bacteria that sometimes pose a danger to health.

But of all the physical contaminants, it’s the thought of hair in their food that would kill most people’s appetites dead. Perhaps that’s because it’s more noticeable on a plate than other foreign objects that may go undetected. Or maybe it’s because the mere presence of a strand suggests other areas of cleanliness could have also been overlooked.

Archie Magoulas works for the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service as a food safety specialist. And in an interview with Vice, he explained, “Hair can be an indicator of lack of sanitation at the facility where the food was prepared.” So it’s little wonder customers find it so off-putting.

Another thing that makes the idea of food and hair mixing so unpalatable is the potential substances that strands may carry. That’s because the contaminant may have been exposed to a number of chemicals, including those found in common styling products like gels, sprays and dyes. Even so, they are not considered a chemical hazard when found on our plates.

Hair actually comprises 98 percent protein, most of which is keratin. This protective substance is found throughout the body, with one function being to line our internal organs. As such, dermatology professor Adam Friedman explained to Vice, “Ingesting a hair or two… will likely not be problematic and will just pass right through you – we can’t digest it.”

Given that small amounts of hair can be consumed safely, then, the issue around the contaminant boils down to the quality of food, rather than its safety. In fact, the FDA’s Food Defect Action Levels allows at most 11 rodent hairs in 50 grams of cinnamon, citing them among the “natural or unavoidable defects in foods that present no health hazards for humans.”

Potential physical risks come with consuming hair, though. These include choking or mouth damage. In theory, Friedman told Vice, “a hair in the mouth could puncture the mucosa [mucous membrane], causing inflammation and pain.” Such an infliction seems unlikely, mind you.

That being said, there is a chance that loose strands could carry bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus. But there’s little chance that a small amount of hair would have enough pathogens present to cause illness if ingested. What’s more, it’s even less likely that bacteria could survive the cooking process, if the contaminant entered the food before it was exposed to high temperatures.

Markus Lipp works at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization as a senior food safety officer. And as he explained to Vice, “In most cases, it is unlikely that a single hair can contain enough – and the ‘right’ kind– of bacteria to cause food poisoning.” He added, “If food is stored correctly, it is unlikely that the microbes present can grow significantly… during the lifetime of the food.”

For the most part then, accidentally eating a stray strand that’s found its way into your meal is unlikely to harm you. But there’s at least one example of when consuming hair can be potentially dangerous. And this can occur as a result of the hair-pulling disorder trichotillomania.

Trichotillomania is a body-focused repetitive behavior, similar to nail-biting and lip chewing. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it is classified as an obsessive-compulsive disorder. And while it can differ in terms of severity from patient to patient, by definition it impairs thinking and causes distress.

In 2017 psychiatry professor Dr. Katharine Phillips told the HealthLine website that trichotillomania usually affects girls aged above 12. And it’s believed that 10 to 20 percent of those with the condition will go on to develop trichophagia. This is a compulsion that leads to the consumption of hair.

It’s not clear what exactly causes trichotillomania or trichophagia, and hair-eating can be hard to detect. That’s because some people might not even realize they are doing it. Alternatively, the shame and stigma associated with the syndrome often mean it can go unreported for years, which can become an issue.

Consuming hair in excessive amounts can be dangerous to health as it can cause hairballs to form in the stomach. As Dr. Runjhun Misra pointed out to Healthline, these are not biodegradable. With that in mind, they can build up in the body, creating catastrophic consequences.

One such negative outcome is the so-called Rapunzel syndrome. This occurs when a hairball in the digestive system travels beyond the stomach and into the small intestine. This can have a series of potentially dangerous effects, including bowel obstruction and intestinal bleeding. Thankfully though, the ailment is uncommon.

Sadly, on rare occasions, Rapunzel syndrome can be fatal. In 2017 it was reported that a 16-year-old girl had died in the U.K, after suffering from tricophagia for a number of years. The hair-eating compulsion created a hairball in the stomach which became infected, leading to a burst ulcer and causing the teenager’s organs to shut down.

Although cases such as the U.K. teen’s are undeniably tragic, they don’t really compare to accidentally consuming the odd hair with food. In fact, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that finding such a contaminant on our plates was considered a major faux pas. If anything, it was seen as a minor inconvenience rather than a reason to disregard a dish altogether.

You may be surprised to learn that it was a marketing ploy by a hairnet manufacturer that changed the way we thought about finding strands in our food forever. After low-maintenance haircuts such as the bob became popular in the 1920s, Venida found its head covering fell out of fashion. So it turned to marketing guru Edward Bernays to turn its fortunes around.

As part of his attempt to boost Venida’s sales, Bernays spun hairs as germ-laden hazards, just waiting to fall out of waitresses’ heads and contaminate the dishes they carry. He started publicizing wayward strands as a safety risk in the food industry, ushering in an era in which servers were expected to cover their heads with nets.

Bernays’ hairnet-selling tactic paid off. In 1922 health commissioners started considering mandating the accessories in a bid to keep waitresses hair off of customer’s plates. Suddenly, wayward strands were something to be feared, with one New York Tribune headline warning “waving tresses of soft drink shakers a public menace, health heads agree.”

Before long, states up and down the country were pushing through laws to make the wearing of hair restraints compulsory for restaurant staff. As such, customers began to see unbound hair as something somewhat unsavory and came to expect waitresses to keep their locks wrapped up.

The change in consumer expectations when it comes to loose hair is seemingly what informs the FDA Food Code today. It dictates that certain restaurant staff “shall wear hair restraints such as hats, hair coverings or nets, beard restraints, and clothing that covers body hair.”

But given that consuming hair doesn’t actually pose a danger to health, the wearing of hairnets appears to be nothing more than a P.R. exercise. After all, if a restaurant is flaunting the hairnet guidance, there’s the chance that it’s taken a lax approach to other food safety guidelines too.

So while it’s unlikely to harm you if you find hair in your meal while dining out, you are well within your rights to raise the issue with management. As is often the case with food, it’s a good idea to follow your gut. Magoulas told Vice, “If you sense there’s a problem with any food product, don’t consume it.” It’s as simple as that!