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Simple cooking methods flush arsenic out of rice (2015)
- deegles 7y ago> “The team then cooked rice in an apparatus that continually condenses steam to produce a fresh supply of distilled hot water” What device is that?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- redwood 7y agoA drip coffee maker
- joecool1029 7y agoNo. They used a percolator. Auto drip doesn't actually distill the water or get as hot. Read: https://ggccoffee.com/drip-coffee-vs-percolator/ https://ggccoffee.com/drip-coffee-vs-percolator/
- kmill 7y agoThe lab apparatus they used to compare against the coffee maker might be a Soxhlet extractor.
- DanBC 7y ago---begin--- Cooking rice in where percolating cooking water is recycled through condensation Here all 41 samples of bought rice were cooked in a standard Soxhlet apparatus. Rice grain, fresh from the packet, was accurately weighed (2g) into a VWR Soxhlet thimble and was then placed into an 25cm long and 3.5cm diameter Quickfit Soxhlet which was attached to a 250ml receiving flask at one end and a dimpled Vigreux 25cm condensing tube (14 rows of 3 dimples = 42 dimples in total), with the receiving flask sitting within an electrically heated mantle and supported by a retort stand and clamps. At the start of the experiment the flask was filled with 200ml of double-distilled, deionized distilled water. Rice cooking was timed as per number of Soxhlet reflux cycles, with 3 cycles sufficient to fully cook the rice. At the end of the 3rd cycle the thimble containing rice was removed and rice freeze dried and milled as described for the cooking volume experiment. ---end---
- Havoc 7y ago---begin--- I am a robot ---end---
- DanBC 7y agoI guess I should have included the plos link. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131608 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... I use ---begin---/---end--- because HN has sub-optimal quoting, and pasting from PDF is often terrible. bleep bloop.
- HarryHirsch 7y agoIt sounds much like a steamer pot or steamer insert. It's like a pot with holes in the bottom that sits on top of your regular pot. People cook tamales in it.
- clircle 7y agoI 'wash' my rice several times before it goes in the rice cooker. I wonder what percent of the arsenic I'm removing.
- jayalpha 7y agoAll Chinese do.
- devnonymous 7y agoAll Asians do AFAIK. Also, Indians (and perhaps a lot of south-asians) cook a lot with (ground/) parboiled rice.
- GordonS 7y agoAt least in India, I believe this is generally done to help wash out any grit - the same process is used for lentils too.
- oska 7y agoNot so necessary now, with most rice and lentils (including in India) being passed through a sortex machine. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUFe1et8qu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUFe1et8qu8
- selimthegrim 7y agoDo you mean poha?
- sfifs 7y agoThere's "raw" rice and there's parboiled rice. Parboiled rice is more nutritious. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parboiled_rice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parboiled_rice Poha is flattened or beaten rice. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattened_rice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattened_rice
- eBombzor 7y agoCan't find the paper but hasn't this been found to degrade the nutritional profile as well? Using large amount of water works both ways.
- kingbirdy 7y agoAt least in the US, the initial processing of rice removes some nutrients, which is why white rice is required by law to be enriched by coating it with certain vitamins and minerals. If you rinse your rice or cook it in excess water such as the paper recommends, you'd be removing the enriched coating, which could put you at risk of certain nutritional deficiencies if you ate a mostly rice-based diet.
- Havoc 7y agoPretty sure rice doesn't have much of a nutritional profile to start with...
- jayalpha 7y agoWow. Nature. But then, really? Sounds to me like a terrible idea. 1. Consumes much more water than needed now. 2. Consumes much more Energy than needed now. 3. Yes, you leach out part of the Arsenic for sure, sounds like a "continuous extraction process". Rice contains nutrients and vitamins. How about them?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- patrickg_zill 7y agoConsumes water? What is the water changed into at the molecular level, exactly?
- jayalpha 7y agoWaste water? You realize there is a difference between drinking water, "Grey water" and waste water? Sure, just a few liters of drinking water wasted. Now lets 1.5B Indians, 1.2 B Chinese and a bunch of other Asian countries do this, where people eat rice every day.
- devm0de 7y agoMight be prohibitively expensive but a recycling percolating cooker with an arsenic filter could be created.
- lefty2 7y agoCooking rice that way makes it taste worse. Better to use rice that doesn't have arsenic in it in the first place. Asian grown rice has the lowest amount of arsenic: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/which-brands-and-sources-of-rice-have-the-least-arsenic/ https://nutritionfacts.org/video/which-brands-and-sources-of...
- gnicholas 7y agoTLDW: US-grown rice is among the worst for arsenic, except California. The South is especially bad because of prior use of arsenic-based pesticides used for cotton. Lundberg brand (based in California) has taken a strong stand to be good and transparent and has lots of info on their website.
- pmoriarty 7y agoIt might be lower in arsenic, but you still have to watch out for other heavy metals. For example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4690941/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4690941/
- amelius 7y agoWhy doesn't my rice nutrition facts label indicate the amount of arsenic in my rice?
- delinka 7y agoBecause it isn't a significant source of dietary arsenic.
- DoctorOetker 7y agothe article states: >Billions of people eat rice daily, but it contributes more arsenic to the human diet than any other food. so that is in direct contradiction to your claim, according to you, what are then the more significant sources of dietary arsenic? then we can start comparing levels...
- delinka 7y agoThere's a definition for "significant source" for each type of food component. The food components for which this is a valid statement are fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, dietary fiber, sugars, and various vitamins. My comment is sarcasm and intends to indicate that arsenic comes in such an insignificant quantity as to not even be on FDA's radar for even defining levels for reporting on nutritional labels.
- InitialLastName 7y agoGiven that (as I have to assume) most human diets are optimized to some extent around the parameter "Doesn't contain much arsenic", something could be the largest contributor of arsenic while still providing too little arsenic to have an effect on health.
- sametmax 7y agoAnything below 1% is not showned in France, maybe it's the same in your country.
- philliphaydon 7y agoRice contains arsenic??? I just found out a few days ago my favourite vege, bamboo shoot, contains cyanide... and is sold pre boiled to remove it...
- sjg007 7y agoBroccoli contains cyanide too. The rice arsenic thing is a bigger deal though. Some enterprising entrepreneur needs to come out with a percolating rice maker.
- philliphaydon 7y agoIt’s clearly a sign. Vegetables are tying to kill us. :( apparently bamboo is deadly to humans and only pandas and lemurs (spelling) can eat it raw. It must be boiled for a period of time for human consumption.
- 01100011 7y ago> Vegetables are tying to kill us. I seem to remember a Bruce Sterling book(Islands in the Net?) where one of the characters avoided vegetables for this reason.
- jayalpha 7y ago"Vegetables are tying to kill us." Of cause they try to. It is normal evolutionary behavior of plants. And co-evolution of humans to being able to tolerate this toxins.
- witten 7y agoI wonder how the boiling method (https://www.saveur.com/perfect-brown-rice-recipe https://www.saveur.com/perfect-brown-rice-recipe) fares in regards to arsenic, given that: 1. You can use a higher water-to-rice ratio than with traditional methods, and 2. The remaining cooking water is discarded at the end.
- option_greek 7y agoI wonder if arsenic in rice is even a true concern. Billions of people across Asia eat it as staple food and the incidence of cancer is usually lower (could be due to low reported cases though).
- hedora 7y agoIt depends on the country. The study mentions Bangladesh and (American) rice based baby food. Not sure about Bangladesh, but arsenic was commonly used as an insecticide in US rice fields in the south, so rice from that region still has some of the highest arsenic concentrations on earth. In the US rice is less of a staple food (except for infants), so it matters less, I guess.
- tomxor 7y ago> In the US rice is less of a staple food (except for infants), so it matters less, I guess. If it's that way around it's likely to matter more, infants tend to be far more sensitive to toxins than adults. Specifically it can seriously affect brain development, same with lead.
- tomxor 7y agoAs with all things cancer, you can't easily compare completely different cultures, this is yet another carcinogen, one of the millions of contributing factors to cancer.
- askvictor 7y agoA brief bit of googling suggested suggests that rice from Asian countries is substantially lower in arsenic; I have no idea why though.
- mveety 7y agoCould be that they didn’t use arsenic based pesticides as much or if they did environmental factors/farming techniques removed the ability for the plants to uptake the arsenic. They might also just have less naturally occurring arsenic in their soil.
- ggm 7y agoWhere beriberi comes from? Rice bran is needed. Polished rice is nutritional emptyness
- systematical 7y agohad no idea rice had high arsenic content. Its a stable of my diet, I eat it probably 2 or 3 times a week.
- aaron695 7y agoThis is only of interest for the rich. Who can chose low arsenic rice and get government controls put in anyway. The poor simple cannot spend the time implementing controls that are invisible to them. There's also no way of learning what's really important and what's myth. The rich have enough issues with that. If anyone wants a list of water wells that have arsenic levels to high that's also easy to get. There exists ways to reduce arsenic in the poor, but it needs work not another academic howto that's just not practical. Watch Born Sweet it's a good doco on arsenic poisoning from wells - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYhq-dAn3Po https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYhq-dAn3Po