Truth about whether you should put warm food in the fridge after expert divides opinion

The age old debate of whether or not you should put your warm leftovers in the fridge is still winding people up to this day.

If you're the type of person who loves a quick clean-up, you immediately shove the uneaten remains into the fridge, regardless of the temperature.

Or you're one of them who leaves the lid partly open to let all the steam out of your meal prep before storing.

Either way, hygiene and clean beauty expert Madame Sweat (Mary Futher) has taken to TikTok to explain why she thinks people have been storing their food wrong all this years.

"Don't leave food sitting out on your counter. If you left it out for more than two hours, you may as well throw it in the garbage," Futher said.

"The sooner you get it into the fridge, the better.

"Make sure your leftovers are placed into a shallow dish. Don't put a big ginormous dish in the refrigerator because it'll take longer to cool down."

Her theory is backed up by the Washington State Department of Health who said that hot food is fine to be placed in the refrigerator.

Large amounts of food should be divided into small portions and put in shallow containers for quicker cooling in the refrigerator, they said.

Viewers in the comments were left divided, as one person commented: "I always leave hot or warm food on the counter for about 30 minutes so it doesn’t impact the temp inside the fridge."

Another added: "Been trying to convince my dear wife to do this for years, but I just get an earful. She also leaves the lid partly open so it doesn't get moist. grrr."

"Not me thinking about all the pizzas I've eaten the next morning that sat out all night," a third said.

"My mom said it’ll warm up the temperature inside the fridge. Made sense to me when I was a kid. Now I’m like, um, what?" a final commented.

This comes after a student died after eating a bowl of reheated pasta in tomato sauce at his parents' house.

AJ, from Brussels, Belgium, had prepared the dish five days earlier and left it at room temperature in the kitchen. After a long day at school, the 20-year-old quickly reheated the meal in the microwave to eat before heading out to play sport.

He returned home just 30 minutes later suffering from a headache, stomach pains and nausea, and eventually experienced diarrhoea and vomiting.

When the lad's parents checked on him the following morning because he didn’t get out of bed for school, they found him dead in his bed.

Investigators determined that he'd passed away at around 4am, about ten hours after consuming the leftover pasta dish.

An autopsy later found that AJ had moderate centrilobular liver necrosis, which likely caused his organs to shut down.

AJ died in 2008 but his story reemerged recently after users on social media warned others about 'fried rice syndrome.'

This refers to food poisoning caused by eating reheated foods which haven't been stored correctly, including rice, pasta and potatoes.

Uncooked foods contain spores of Bacillus cereus which are heat resistant and can survive when the food is cooked.

If the cooked food is then left at room temperature, these spores grow into bacteria which multiply and may produce toxins that cause vomiting and/or diarrhoea.

In rare cases, like AJ's, it can be fatal.