The truth about eating cold rice causing poisoning and cancer that everyone should know

Recently, information has appeared on social networks that eating reheated cold rice will cause food poisoning and even cancer. Is this information accurate and reliable?

According to experts, you can absolutely get food poisoning from eating reheated cold rice, but it is not the reheating that causes the rice to produce toxins, but the toxins that were previously produced during the rice storage process.

Why does cold rice cause food poisoning?

This is because cooked rice or rice may contain spores of Bacillus cereus, a bacteria that can cause food poisoning. Even though the rice has been cooked, the bacteria can still survive.

After eating rice, rice left at room temperature can cause spores to grow into bacteria. These bacteria will multiply and can produce toxins that cause vomiting and diarrhea.

The longer rice is left at room temperature, the more likely it is to become unsafe due to bacterial or endotoxin contamination.

According to Associate Professor Dr. Nguyen Duy Thinh, cold rice is safe and unlikely to cause poisoning if the rice is cooked and left to cool within 24 hours.

“Cold rice cannot cause poisoning if it has not gone bad or spoiled. Therefore, if the rice has gone bad, it should not be eaten and in reality, no one eats spoiled rice,” Mr. Thinh told Vietq newspaper.

However, even if the rice has not spoiled, it must be used properly so that the rice does not produce endotoxins.

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According to experts, it is best to eat rice as soon as it is cooked. If there is leftover rice, it should be stored in the refrigerator but not more than 1 day at a temperature below 5 degrees Celsius. In particular, rice should only be reheated once, not reheated many times.

Another noteworthy issue is the risk of poisoning from cold rice, not only in the home but also in restaurants that often use cold rice to make fried rice.

We cannot control whether the amount of cold rice is kept for days or not, so the risk of food poisoning from it is also very high.

Does cold rice cause stomach cancer?

According to Dr. Luong Quoc Chinh, A9 Emergency Department, Bach Mai Hospital, the longer cold rice is left, the more toxins it produces.

The reason is that the main ingredient of rice is starch, when left for a long time it will go through the process of "starch gelatinization" which makes the rice have an extremely unpleasant taste and significantly affects the digestive process.

However, according to Dr. Chinh, saying that cold rice causes stomach cancer is not accurate because no one regularly eats rice that has deteriorated to such a terrible extent for such a long time that it causes disease.

If a warning is needed, according to Dr. Chinh in Vietq newspaper, it is a warning about the problem of rice and rice products that may contain toxins such as arsenic at very high concentrations in the US in 2013, which causes cancer.

According to Soha