I spent last night sitting comfortably in my chair watching the Discovery Channel. We had eaten out, as a family, at Friday's and I was unwinding from a tough week at work.
Anyway, a show called Myth Busters was on multiple times in a row. The premise is that they take myths and urban legends and try to recreate them to see if they are actually possible or not. This particular episode on Poppy Seeds was simply amazing.
The two guys on the show ate a couple bagels or poppy seed muffins each. They then used the standard quick test used by most employment screeners and after only an hour one of them started showing positive for opiates. They continued to test positive for almost 8 hours!
This means that you could grab a big muffin on the way to a drug screening and you'd never get the job because you'd be positive.
Posted by bbarton at March 8, 2003 10:04 AMThat's always been the party line, right? You'd have to eat a truckload of them. They estimate that there are tens of thousands of people out there who've been denied a job, promotion, or lost a job from eating a bagel. Very sad indeed.
Posted by: Bob on March 12, 2003 06:56 AM
Hey, so I'm late in responding since I just found your blog... but I saw the same show on the Discovery Channel. Funny thing is that MTV did the same "urban-legend" test a couple of months ago. The same thing happened, and I think the girl didn't eat as many bagels. Also, they asked the lab tech who did the test about it, and he said it was nearly impossible to have a false positive. He said you'd have to eat a truck load of poppy seeds!! Interesting that even those performing the test don't believe it! How sad!
Posted by: Steph on March 11, 2003 08:10 PM