Why you should know:
Arsenic is a carcinogen and has various other negative health effects; enough to warrant exposure limits in various jurisdictions. A five minute boil-and-discard step before cooking is a simple way to reduce your exposure, especially if you eat a lot of rice.
Details are in the study, linked in the title of this post. Here’s a diagram from the abstract:
Ysk your body can naturally get rid of arsenic so this is pointless.
Let’s do the math. Rice contains about 0.4 mg/kg As by weight. The “bad” rice in Louisiana or whatever contains about 75% more - about 0.7 mg/kg. Let’s round up to 1 mg/kg to make the math easy. Chronic exposure limits for a 50 kg adult are about 5 mg/day (on the low end).
So you’d have to choke down a full 10 lb bag of rice every day (about 110 cups of cooked rice) to start to tip the scales. Other sources of arsenic, like groundwater, are likely far more significant.
Comment stolen from reddit
Oh boy, someone better go back and tell all of Asia for the last 10,000 years
Neither the rice species nor the way it is prepared is the same as it was 10000 years ago. India has been producing spices for millenia but the massive amounts of arsenic, cadmium, and lead found in spices sold on the Indian market (and sometimes in Indian exports) is still a recent development.
The world is moving towards a focus on mass production through industrialisation on a record scale. This has an impact on things like the natural water sources, which is where most arsenic in rice is coming from.
Europe has limits on the amount of arsenic in rice, but I’ve never seen a lack of rice varieties in my supermarkets. You can have rice without huge amounts of arsenic, that’s not a weird thing to ask for.
