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MARQUETTE -- Did you know that by eating poppy seeds, you could test positive on a drug test?   A New Castle, Pennsylvania woman recently tested positive for drugs after eating a bagel with poppy seeds.  As a result, her newborn baby was temporarily taken away from her.

When you bite into a poppy seed bagel, you're actually consuming a very small dosage of opiates.  Although you can't get high from the small amount, it can cause you to test positive on a drug test. This is because of the way the drug breaks down in the body.

"Poppy seeds that are found on many food products, as they're metabolized in the body, they break down into morphine and codeine," says Dr. John Lehtinen of Marquette General.

Whether or not the poppy seeds show up on a drug test depends on how strong the seeds are, which Dr. Lehtinen says is impossible to know.  How can doctors tell if a drug test is positive because of something as innocent as eating a poppy seed bagel?  They go back and analyze the results.

"It becomes a matter of quantitation or the amount of morphine and codeine that specimen has.  If you have a morphine level above 3,000, it's not poppy seeds; it's due to some other reason," Dr. Lehtinen says.

However, Dr. Lehtinen also adds that not all drug tests get confirmation testing, which is when a trained medical review officer goes back and checks the results.  In that case, a person could fail a drug test and get a false positive, like the New Castle mother.

Wednesday, we spoke with Jim Winkler, the head hockey trainer at NMU, about how the university educates their athletes on drug testing.  He says that poppy seeds aren't the only unexpected substance that can make a drug test come out positive.

"Athletes need to know that supplements are sometimes mislabelled; sometimes they take things that aren't what they're labelled as.  If somebody makes significant muscle gain, gains weight, a lot of times there may be an anabolic agent in there that's not labelled--this is a problem with student athletes who buy things out of the country," says Winkler.

Winkler says that's why he tells all of his athletes that they're responsible for what they put in their bodies.

The New Castle mother who inspired our story has since had her child returned to her.