Even in a society preoccupied with cleanliness, one might expect the restroom — in particular, the toilet — to be slightly unclean. We wouldn’t want to eat off of a toilet seat, for instance, or do anything with the water but flush it. But unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 10 years, you’ve heard at least one “dirtier than a toilet seat” study. Here is a compilation thereof, and you don’t even have to wait for the news at 10:00.

ABC News reports that fast food ice is dirtier than toilet water! Jasmine Robert’s award-winning middle school science project proved that “70 percent of the time, ice from fast food restaraunts was dirtier than toilet water.” Ironically, E. coli was among the bacteria. It’s a cold, hard fact that these machines are not cleaned, and neither are the people scooping ice.

Not convinced? Maybe I can steer you in the right direction by informing you that steering wheels are almost three times dirtier than toilets! AOL Motoring finds 41,600 germs on the average steering wheel compared to 17,400 on a toilet seat. “If food or dirt is transmitted on to the wheel and not regularly cleaned, then the germs multiply and pretty quickly you can be left with an area more unsanitary than a toilet.”

Hold the phone – ABC News informs us that cell phones are also dirtier than a toilet! Microbiologist Chuck Gerba explains “You put it in a warm place, you hold it in your hand, you put it in your pocket…bacteria like that. It can grow in these types of places.” Half of the phones Gerba tests are home to staph bacteria.

You think you can go to work and escape the filth? Chuck Gerba has that covered too – or more specifically, it too is covered… in bacteria! The average desk is houses 400 times more bacteria than a toilet seat. Gerba enlightens us again: “For bacteria, a desk is really the laptop of luxury…They can feast all day from breakfast to lunch and even dinner.” Next time you’re at your desk, know that your hand is resting on “10,000,000 bacteria”. A later University of Arizona study by Dr. Ingram contrasts the toilet’s “49 microbes per square inch” against the office phone with “25,127 microbes per square inch”

From these consistent results, it seems that these studies are approaching the problem from the wrong angle. If all of these things are dirtier than toilets, then what is cleaner than a toilet?