Turns out most rice we eat has dangerous levels of arsenic.  This is particularly true in baby and infant food.   Arsenic is a Category One carcinogen specializing in lung, skin, and bladder cancer.  Oh, happy day.  The gist: eat less rice, no more than half-a-cup per day.

A while back Consumer Reports ran a study that turned up serious levels of arsenic in many brands of apple and grape juices.  This prompted them to do another round of tests on rice, particularly susceptible to arsenic because it’s a water plant.  What CR found was that pretty much each of the 65 rice products they tested with 223 samples—brown or white, organic or synthetically-altered, adult cereal or infant cereal—were tainted far above EPA standards.

The EPA does not regular arsenic in food.  It does so in water, though, choosing 10 parts per billion of inorganic arsenic as the threshold of acceptability.  This level was negotiated by the USA Rice Federation and chemical companies up from the 5 ppb threshold favored by scientists, and negotiation of thresholds for naturally-occurring arsenic are still being negotiated.  The cost to the rice and chemical industries of working that negotiation are far less than the cost of making their products safer, you can be sure.  Rice is a $34 billion-a-year enterprise.

Once CR released its study, the FDA, who has been studying arsenic in rice for decades, released its findings thus far.  The results are more-or-less the same.Among the top tainted products, per quarter-cup of rice: 365 Everyday Value Long Grain Brown at 210 ppb with 7.4 ppb of inorganic arsenic, Gerber Rice at 232 ppb and 1.6 ppb of inorganic, and good old Uncle Bens’ Enriched Parboiled Long Grain at 209 ppb and 5.7 inorganic.  You can see the complete list here.

The U.S. uses more arsenic than any other country in the world.  A lot of that was used in southern cotton states that used it to take out the boll weevil…

What an awesome word:

Boll Weevil!

 …Seventy-five percent of our rice comes from those states.  And to solidify the relationship between rice consumption and arsenic levels in the human body, CR analyzed data from the National Center for Health Statistics.  They found that people who eat one serving of rice a day have arsenic levels 44% higher than those who do not.  Folks eating more than one service have levels 70% higher.

The connection is pretty clear.

Though the U.S. Rice Federation does point out, quite correctly, that “populations with high rice consumption are associated with less overall disease rates and with better health.”  No other factors that might contributie to robust health were considered in that statement.

A few notes:

• Brown rice has higher traces because the outer players of the grain store the arsenic.  Polishing off those layers to make white rice reduce the arsenic content.

• Cook rice in the traditional Chinese way; that is use a water-rice ratio of 6-1.  You’ll have to pour off the excess water, taking some of the nutrients away, but research shows that using more water removes 30% of the inorganic arsenic.

• Eating organic seems to reduce arsenic levels, but not eliminate them.  This is probably due to arsenic levels in water and the arsenic still stored in soil from a century of arsenic-based pesticides.

• Rice Krispies had the lowest levels of arsenic in all of the cereals tested!