Warning: Before you eat that cookie dough, read this story

The claim: Is it true that some kinds of cookie dough are safe to eat?

The science: Cookie dough is delicious.

Many of us who have sneaked a taste or, let’s be honest, licked it off baking utensils, can attest to that. But cookie dough can make us sick, and health authorities warn against eating it.

Don’t lose your holiday spirit, though: Some companies make edible cookie dough. There are even recipes such as The Washington Post’s Monster cookie dough.

The key to preventing bacterial contamination is heat-treating the flour, which you can do in your microwave, and using pasteurized eggs or no eggs.

Commercial cookie dough ice cream is typically safe, too. Ben & Jerry’s, for example, also uses heat-treated flour and pasteurized eggs in its cookie dough ice cream, the company has said.

Raw flour and eggs are the two primary ingredients that make cookie dough a problem for us.

Raw flour can be contaminated with E. coli and salmonella, and unpasteurized eggs can be a carrier of salmonella. Both bacteria are killed in the cooking process, but contaminated food that is not cooked or is undercooked has been known to make people sick, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This year, a salmonella outbreak linked to cookie dough sickened 26 people in six states.

Salmonella, specifically, can “infect the intestinal lining and cause infectious colitis, which, in turn, presents clinically in the form of diarrhea,” Christine Lee, a gastroenterologist at the Cleveland Clinic, told The Post in May. Symptoms may also include fever, the CDC said.

An E. coli infection can cause severe stomach pain, diarrhea and vomiting.

With both illnesses, patients usually recover in less than a week. But people with a fever higher than 102 degrees who also have diarrhea, diarrhea that does not improve after three days or bloody stools, or those showing signs of dehydration should contact their health-care providers, according to the CDC.

What else you should know: There’s a reason cookie dough is so irresistible.

It’s “all about the texture,” said Emily Nejad, owner of Bon Vivant Cakes, a cake- and cookie-decorating school in Chicago. “People love texture and variety, and cookie dough is the perfect mix of something that’s soft and kind of creamy and sort of chewy.”

Nejad said in May that she wonders whether it also has something to do with nostalgia.

“It takes me right back to fifth-grade sleepovers where you’re staying up, you’re drinking soda, you’re watching teen movies and you are going to town on cookie dough and packages of marshmallows,” she said.

The bottom line: Delicious as it is, cookie dough can cause serious foodborne illness, putting a real damper on holiday festivities. But you can get your fix with versions that are made to be eaten safely.