REVEALED: Your reusable shopping bags could be making you sick

If you're someone who only uses reusable shopping bags when getting the groceries - you're awesome.

We appreciate you helping the environment.

But we have some bad news.

The Food Standards Agency in America have just released a warning for shoppers, saying reusable bags pose a food poisoning risk.

A recent study, by University of Arizona and Loma Linda University, found that almost all reusable bags randomly selected from customers entering a grocery store contained large amounts of bacteria.

What's even more disgusting is nearly half contained coliform bacteria, and 12% contained E. Coli.

Following the study, the FSA is now encouraging shoppers to use separate bags for raw meat, ready-to-eat food and non-food items.

Posting on their website, the FSA also advised shoppers to:

• Wrap raw meat packages in a separate, disposable plastic bag, and throw out the bag as soon as you get home.
• Regularly wash reusable bags between uses to reduce bacteria. When washed, either by machine or by hand, the amount of bacteria was reduced by more than 99.9 percent.
• Avoid storing reusable bags in the car or another hot place, as bacteria spreads more quickly here; store in a cool, dry place instead.

They also suggested colour coding the bags to help you keep raw items separate.