Meal prep is something that's encouraged for people who want to save a bit of money and perhaps stick to a healthy diet during the week. But for a student named AJ, reheating a meal proved to be fatal.
It all started when the 20-year-old from Belgium was warming up a dish he prepared five days earlier at his parents' house in 2008.
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After a long day at school, he came home to heat up the meal he had left out at room temperature.
He presumably just wanted a quick bite before he headed out to play some sports.
However, when the student got back home, he started to suffer from a headache and various other symptoms, like nausea and stomach pain.
AJ eventually experienced diarrhoea and vomiting before drinking some water and heading off to bed around midnight.
When his parents checked in on him the following morning, he was dead in his bed.
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Investigators believe he passed away around 4.00am, which would have been around 10 hours after consuming the tomato-based pasta dish.
An autopsy later found that AJ had moderate centrilobular liver necrosis, which likely caused his organs to shut down.
The report said: "The spaghetti had been kept at room temperature for several days.
"This allowed Bacillus cereus to grow to very high concentrations and produced the high toxin concentration (14.8 μg/g) found in the pasta and which is likely responsible for the fatal outcome."
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AJ died 16 years ago but his story reemerged recently after users of TikTok and Reddit took to the platforms to warn 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.
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In rare cases like AJ's, it can be life-threatening.
Social media users were horrified to find out how serious 'fried rice syndrome' can be, as one person on Reddit wrote: "I regularly eat pizza a day or two later after it’s left on the side. I had no idea."
Another said: "Three days is my rule for leftovers. I’m going to revisit that."
But others on TikTok were more shocked that it wasn't common knowledge to not eat leftovers that hadn't been stored in the refrigerator.
"Do people not know that they need to refrigerate food?" one person queried.
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To prevent your leftovers from making you sick, make sure any starchy food you consume hasn't been kept at room temperature for an extended period of time.
Cool down starchy foods as quickly as possible — ideally within an hour — and keep them in the fridge until you're ready to eat.
Topics: Health, Food And Drink
Anish Vij