Experts Warn Leaving These Common Foods Out Too Long Could Be Dangerous — Or Even Fatal

Most of us have come home from a restaurant and dropped our neatly packaged leftovers on the counter before getting distracted by our dog or kid or an episode of “Abbot Elementary.” Before we know it, it’s bedtime and that half-serving of pad thai has been sitting out for who knows how long.

We desperately want to eat it for lunch tomorrow, but if we do, will we end up the victim of an unfortunate gastric episode — or even worse?

That’s what we aimed to find out when we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, the co-hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — recently chatted with Kristen Aiken, HuffPost’s executive director of Life and Commerce.

Listen to the full episode here.

During our 45 minutes together, Aiken, a culinary school grad and passionate food safety aficionado, gave us tips on how to spare our stomachs (and other delicate body parts) from the nightmarish repercussions of spoiled food.

The most shocking thing we learned was that some common foods are especially dangerous when left out — and consuming them has even led to death.

“[The name for this] is ‘Fried Rice Syndrome’ colloquially, but it really applies to [almost all] pastas and rices,” Aiken told us before reading from a case report about a young Belgian man who died after consuming spaghetti with red sauce that had been left on his counter at room temperature for five days. An autopsy revealed that there were high levels of bacillus cereus present in his body.

“It’s a pretty common bacteria that’s found in most foods, and it doesn’t make most of us sick most of the time,” Aiken explained. “It’s bacteria that starts as a spore that’s inactive. Once you heat it during the initial cooking, it can become activated and release toxins. And the