The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has released a study ranking different types of food according to how likely they are to make consumers sick. The study identified dairy products as the safest category and used that as the baseline. In other words, the score of 29 for fish/shellfish means that, on a pound-for-pound basis, eating it is 29 times more likely to make you sick than consuming dairy foods.

“Modernizing this [food safety] system should be an urgent priority of the Obama administration, to reduce outbreaks and illnesses from food and restore consumer confidence,” says Caroline Smith DeWaal, CSPI’s director of food safety.

A data set of foodborne illness  has been published by CSPI for the last 10 years, and can be reviewed on CSPI’s website (www.cspinet.org). Each year, according to the federal government, foodborne illness sickens 76 million and kills 5,000 Americans.