Why you should never put warm food in the refrigerator: the results of an experiment

If you've ever lost your patience waiting for your dinner to cool before you can put your leftovers in the fridge, you're probably not alone. But you might want to rethink that again after learning what an expert discovered after experimenting with warm leftovers in the fridge.

Food policy specialist Gavin Wren conducted a scientific experiment to show why hot food in the fridge "really messes with the temperature" and can damage your appliance. He talked about it in his video on TikTok.

To make his experiment as scientific as possible, Gavin took three temperature recorders and placed them in different parts of the refrigerator: one in the salad drawer, one behind the middle shelf, and the last one in the front of the top.

"These three areas of the fridge are going to react very differently to things like this," Gavin explained. He then created an interactive graph to show how the temperature changed when he put hot leftovers in the fridge.

For example, at 7 a.m., Gavin forgot to close the refrigerator door, so the temperature on the top shelf rose to 9 degrees, and the temperature on the middle shelf rose to 7 degrees, but nothing changed in the fruit and vegetable drawer.

To test his theory further, Gavin put a pot of warm rice on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, which actually "had a slight effect on the salad drawer."

At 7:00 p.m., Gavin prepared a meal with ingredients from his fridge, divided them into portions, and placed them warm on the top shelf of the fridge. "The temperature on the top shelf rose to 18 degrees, and it took four hours for it to return to the previous level," he explained.

This can not only be harmful to the refrigerator, but it will also create problems with food storage because in such conditions they can deteriorate much faster.

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