Must-Read: How To Cook Out Carefully

Cookouts are great. They are truly one of the best parts of the summer season. What isn’t so great, however, are when you end up getting sick in the days that follow because someone decided not to pay attention to how to go about cooking in a safe and healthy way. Food poisoning is one of those things that could just ruin your entire summer, and is best to be avoided.

Which is why today we’re heading over to Men’s Health where they have a whole bunch of ways to make sure that you don’t get terribly sick during this summer’s big cookouts. For example, among their list of tips:

YOU WASH YOUR CHICKEN
A new study from University of California-Davis analyzed footage of 120 people prepping food in their kitchens?with almost half washing their chicken in the sink. It’s a faulty maneuver because not only does that spray the chicken bacteria around to other surfaces in your kitchen, it also doesn’t remove any bacteria from the chicken itself. (Only cooking the bird does that.)

Do This: Marinating your meat in an oil and vinegar mixture with spices and herbs can reduce potential cancer-causing compounds that form on meat during grilling?called heterocyclic amines (HCA)?by nearly 90 percent, according to a study in the Journal of Food Science. Make sure to marinate in the fridge?letting the chicken soak up sauce on the counter is another recipe for germ growth.

So, keep that in mind next time you’re grilling out. And then head on over to the link above to check out the rest of the tips so that you don’t end up slumping on your couch for the next week after the big cook-out.