SPRINGFIELD -- Here’s some important information as holiday cooking is about to kick into high gear.  Along with the cooking, there will be fruit baskets that will arrive soon.

  You might wonder the best way to make sure your produce is as clean as it can be.  Armed with some apples, we turned to a high school science club to find the most effective way to "wash up" before digging in.

  A scientific experiment is what we wanted -- a way to settle once and for all how to get our fruits and veggies the cleanest that they can be.  So we took some apples to a classroom, and members of Central High's School Science Club agreed to accept our mission and test four different ways of cleaning produce.

  They used four ways of cleaning at four different stations.

 Method 1, a favorite with a lot of these young scientists, is the simple rubdown: no muss, no fuss, just a towel in this case.  In real life sometimes, it’s just a swipe across a t-shirt.

  Method 2 is the shakedown: no towel here, just running water and a few shakes.

  Method 3 involves some serious soap and water; the method you might expect to really clean up in this competition.

  Method 4 is a vinegar bath, a little less sudsy but with an unmistakable bouquet all its own.

  Each apple was swabbed with a cotton swab before cleaning for comparison's sake, then both before and after samples were swabbed onto appropriately labeled petri dishes and stored in an incubator for three days. 

  During the experiment, Rhyan Friesen, our science teacher and lead investigator, tried to dispel our fear of bacteria in general.

  "Most of these bacteria we could eat, bodies would digest, wouldn't be a problem to us.  But, if there's any E. coli on there or salmonella, you might get sick.  But most bacteria is harmless; the body just digests it,” said Friesen.

  That makes us feel a little better.  Still, whatever gets rid of any potential E. coli or salmonella is what we need to know, and what we were looking for in these petri dishes.

  "You put it under here and you count the percentage coverage of the bacteria and that gives you a good idea of how many colonies you have,” said Friesen.

  There were plenty of colonies to be counted.

  "The towel one is not clean at all.  It’s got almost 90- to 100-percent coverage, so don't wipe your apples with towels, people,” said Friesen.

  Not surprisingly, the dry wipe-down was the least effective method of cleaning in this experiment.  Soap and water didn't do as well as the vinegar bath but, in these kids' experiment, just plain old running water, shaken, not dried, actually produced the cleanest results.

  "Water actually gathers up the bacteria and gets if off of the fruit better than the dry sample would,” said Friesen.

  When shaken off, there's no bacteria added from a towel drying.  It was a lesson that just might change the way these kids at least eat their next apple.

  "I'll probably use water.  Those were the cleanest results,” said one student.

  When Consumer Reports performed a similar test, investigators got a similar result.  Running water worked well, although a very diluted solution of dish detergent did get rid of a little more bacteria along with the wax.

  The bottom line is that running water, soap and water, or vinegar all work.  You might save yourself a trip to the emergency room by taking a little extra time to thoroughly wash your fruits and veggies.