In our modern understanding, strangeness is conserved during the strong and the electromagnetic interactions, but not during the weak interactions. Consequently, the lightest particles containing a strange quark cannot decay by the strong interaction, and must instead decay via the much slower weak interaction. In most cases these decays change the value of the strangeness by one unit. However, this doesn't necessarily hold in second-order weak reactions, where there are mixes of K and K mesons. All in all, the amount of strangeness can change in a weak interaction reaction by +1, 0 or −1 (depending on the reaction).