1. The Expiration Date on a Carton of Milk - Do you dump out the remaining milk in a carton once it has reached its printed-on expiration date? If you said “yes” you’ve probably wasted a lot of milk in your life. This date is basically printed on there for the stores to cover their asses by ensuring that they don’t sell you a rotten container of milk. All you have to do to determine if milk is OK to drink is sniff it. If it smells funny, dump it. Unfortunately there’s no easy way to put a “consume by” date on the milk since the amount of time it will last before it goes bad really depends on the temperature of your fridge and the amount of use the carton gets. Someday we will see packaging materials that tell us when the contents are spoiled (the plastic will change colors or something) but these are 5-10 years away from being viable.

2. “Kills 99 percent of germs” - This or some similar statement (sometimes it’s 99.9%) is usually found on disinfectant products such as Lysol. I’m not arguing with the effectiveness of these products, however, in the world of bacterial inactivation, 99% or 99.9 percent is not an outstanding figure in terms of bacterial death. If there are one million E. coli bacteria on your kid’s bottle and you kill 99.9 percent of them you still have more than enough to make the kid very very sick. Disinfectant sprays and wipes are a waste of money, in my opinion. Bacteria and viruses have a way of hiding in so many places that no surface treatment can be depended upon to kill them all.