There might be more arsenic in your diet than you realize. Arsenic in your rice?  Yup.  If you hadn’t heard, small amounts of arsenic are commonly found in rice—particularly flooded rice which accumulates more arsenic than rice grown under aerobic conditions…  Where does the arsenic come from? The water—it is present in drinking water from around the world including in Australia, the US, India, and many other countries.  The problem is that arsenic is carcinogenic: It is linked to cancer and other diseases as well.  When there is arsenic in the groundwater, the water is taken up by the rice plants in the flooded paddies. 

A recent study published in Environmental Science & Technology compared the arsenic levels between flooded rice, most commonly occurring in Southern countries, with aerobic rice planting… What did they find?  Over 10 times  higher levels of arsenic in flooded paddies…  Kinda scary if you ask me.  I checked out the rice I had in my cupboard—a specialty rice that was not made in the US, but in Thailand.  I wonder how much arsenic I’ve been feeding to my daughter… 

Researchers have found that “rice from the United States largely contains organic arsenic, which is less easily absorbed into the body and excreted more rapidly than inorganic arsenic.”   Encouraging, but up till now I haven’t been reading the labels on the rice I buy.   (If you read your labels, look past where the rice was distributed from—if it is distributed from a US company, it still may be grown elsewhere…) Source: Arsenic in Rice: II. Arseni Speciation in USA Grain and Implications for Human heath.  Evironmental Science and Technology.  May 15, 2008.

Want another shocker?  Commercial rice milk also contains arsenic.  Yup, up to three times higher than EU and US water standards, say researchers in the Royal Society of Chemistry's Journal of Environmental Monitoring.

“Researchers from the University of Aberdeen, UK, bought different brands and varieties of rice milk, including organic, non-organic and flavored, from local supermarkets. They showed that of four brands of commercial rice milk tested, all exceeded the EU total arsenic standard of 10 µg l-1 - some by as much as three times. Eighty per cent of samples also failed to meet the US standard of 10 µg l-1 inorganic arsenic.” Source: http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2008/ArsenicMilk.asp 

If you’re drinking rice milk, you could be exposing yourself to chronic arsenic exposure—scary! 

Additonal Sources:
Environmental Science and Technology, DOI: 10.1021/es702212p
Environmental Science and Technology (DOI: 10.1021/es801238p)

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