Still using a spoon from your kitchen silverware drawer to give yourself or your kids cough syrup or other liquid medication? Bad idea. New research shows using a kitchen spoon — instead of a more precise measuring device — can lead to dosing errors by as much as 50 percent.

Researchers tracked the dosing habits of 177 young adults and found the one in three participants who regularly used teaspoons or table spoons to measure out medications were far more likely to take less medicine — between 8 and 12 percent — than recommended.

The researchers — Brian Wansink, of Cornell University, and Koert van Ittersum, of the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) — said the findings suggest the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should require the pharmaceutical industry not use teaspoons on Drug Facts and dosing information. Instead, drug makers should provide dosage information in milliliters and recommend the use of measure cups with such measurements that typically come with liquid medicine.

Doing so would result in more accurate doses, they said.

In fact, their research showed that when study participants were given dosage information in teaspoons, nearly 61 percent opted to use a teaspoon instead of the measuring cup provided with the medicine.

But the dosage recommendation was given in milliliters, the teaspoon and the measuring cup were equally popular, but risk of dosage error decreased by around 50 percent.

"When measuring medicine for ourselves or our children, we often use regular kitchen spoons but they are not accurate measuring instruments," explained van Ittersum.

"While we feel that we can estimate teaspoon doses, milliliters are much harder to estimate visually, therefore people are more likely to use accurate measuring spoons or cups when given dosage information in milliliters."