rice cooker

[calimac]

We have a friend who's something of a health-warning junkie. On our last encounter she told me that she'd banned rice from her diet. It seems that rice is full of arsenic. She'd replaced it with quinoa, a grain I've tried and about which all I can say is that, like replacing chocolate with carob, anybody who claims that it's just as good should never be trusted with anything.

Later I tracked down the arsenic story to this article from Consumer Reports, a source I trust. Yes, there is arsenic in rice. There's arsenic in a lot of things - it's a natural mineral - including, sometimes, quinoa. Yes, there's more arsenic in rice than in other things, but less in some rice than others, and not enough to raise concerns unless you have small children. Don't let your children subsist on rice cakes and rice milk, and don't eat too much yourself: no more than about 1/2 cup (measured uncooked) of brown rice a week, or maybe twice that amount of white rice, assuming you eat nothing else of rice. Brown rice has more arsenic than white rice for the same reason it has more nutrients, and for that reason, despite the arsenic, the article says "you shouldn't switch entirely to white." Which shows that this issue is about balanced health needs, not about getting all worried about arsenic.

That's fine. I make fried rice for dinner maybe twice a month, and I use 2/3 cup uncooked brown rice for the two of us. I've already cut way back on rice otherwise in my diet because it's full of something I fear a lot more than trace arsenic, carbohydrates. I'm not going to worry about this.

Either you believe Consumer Reports and that's enough, or you don't, and choose to eliminate rice entirely from your diet as our friend has ... but in that case, if you're that vigilant about arsenic, eliminating rice isn't enough to fix the problem. Other things can have arsenic, including quinoa. Or, say, chicken. Chicken feed can have arsenic in it, and consequently so can chicken meat. Or ground water.

Once you go down that road, though, you're paralyzing yourself with fear. This isn't new. I remember my brother coming home from school full of information about cholesterol, and under the impression that eating a single egg was a suicidal act. For that matter, the American Heart Association once published an ad with a picture of a steak and the caption, "Heart Attack on a Plate." What occurred to me on seeing that was that, if for some reason you actually wanted a heart attack, eating a single steak would be an awfully inefficient way to go about it. As for arsenic, its toxicity is proven but, in trace levels, not as high as many other things.

This is not the first time that our friend has raised the alarm about something in foodstuff or cooking that's not that alarming - and, if it were, the proposed response isn't enough to counter it. I'm going to remain cautious about it the next time, too.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Saints preserve us from food faddists!

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

A couple of years ago chorale and I read a news article on quinoa becoming unaffordable to people in the Andes for whom it's a dietary staple, because it was all going to U.S. consumers who paid higher prices. We've been avoiding it since then, not for health reasons but for ethical reasons. We may need to look at adding it back in, though, since both our doctors are now recommending lower-carb diets; I'll have to check into relative carb levels.

Do you have any information on arsenic in red rice? That's what we usually eat, rather than brown rice.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's grimly amusing. I'll see what happens when I pass that along to the person I spoke of.

I looked at the full report (linked to from the article I linked to) and it says nothing about red rice. Place of origin is of course important.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Thanks for checking.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I believe that the Consumer Reports article is public. They tend to leave stuff like that unlocked, as a public service. (This is one reason why/how they're a nonprofit organization.) IIRC yes, the place of origin is key, with particular focus on stuff grown in the South and Texas.

I don't know if they've followed up by studying rice from other countries at all, for context.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I think quinoa is a perfectly nice grain but not at all a substitute for rice.

And yea, that is unfortunate about Andean people and a good reason to decide against eating it.