Fried Rice Syndrome: this can make you incredibly sick
If you’ve ever had food poisoning, you know: it’s absolute misery. So avoid it at all costs, although it can happen in a seemingly tiny corner. Take Fried Rice Syndrome, for example. Until recently, I had never heard of it, but it can make you seriously ill.
Fried Rice Syndrome is the nickname for the Bacillus cereus bacterium, which can contaminate rice. What is it and, more importantly: how can you prevent it?
Fried Rice Syndrome
Interestingly enough, the term Fried Rice Syndrome is a little misleading, because the Bacillus cereus bacterium can occur in all kinds of food. More specifically, it can occur in any food that has been boiled or fried and is then kept at room temperature for too long. This form of food poisoning went viral after a 20-year-old Belgian man died from it — and it was shared on TikTok again at the end of last year.
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This bacterium is most commonly found in products containing starch, such as rice or pasta. In the Belgian man’s case, it was a plate of pasta that he had kept outside the refrigerator, then reheated and eaten. Of course, that sounds like a frightening headline designed to cause panic: is storing pasta or rice deadly?!
Something like that may go viral on TikTok… But it isn’t entirely true.
No, you won’t die from day-old rice
The man in question had kept the plate of pasta outside the refrigerator for five days. FIVE. So it’s hardly surprising that he got sick from it (although it is surprising that he didn’t think beforehand that this might be unwise), and the Bacillus cereus bacterium can certainly be so severe that it can kill you. But if you cook pasta or rice and then store it in the refrigerator, nothing is likely to go wrong — you just need to be careful not to keep it outside the refrigerator for a very long time.
How does that work? Dr. Ellen Shumaker explains: once the pasta or rice has been cooked, spores of the bacterium can begin to germinate, become active and produce toxins. And those toxins are what make us sick. ‘The spores of the organism germinate in response to the heat of cooking. The organism survives the cooking process and then grows in food that is not cooled properly and quickly. Once the organism reaches relatively high concentrations (hundreds of thousands or millions of organisms), it can cause illness through infection or the formation of a heat-stable toxin. When people ingest the organism or the toxin, they become ill.’
The temperature danger zone
And that happens in what is known as the ‘Temperature Danger Zone,’ which is between 4 and 60 degrees. To prevent the bacterium from growing, doctors recommend not keeping food in this range for longer than four hours. But to be safe, Dr. Shumaker recommends sticking to a maximum of two hours — then you’ll be completely safe from Fried Rice Syndrome, which is reassuring.
Also read:
- Cooking rice in the oven is a surprising and simple technique for perfect rice
- How to make the most delicious Pad Thai with prawns
- How to: prepare scallops
Source: HuffPost
