"How to Cook Rice to
Lower Arsenic Levels" Cooking rice in a high water to rice
ratio reduces toxic arsenic content. Meaning if you boil rice like pasta, and
then drain off the water at the end, you can drop arsenic levels
in half—50 to 60 percent of the arsenic gets
poured down the drain, whereas the typical way we
make rice, boiling the water off like in a rice cooker
or pot, doesn’t help. Or, it may even make things worse,
if the water you’re using to cook the rice has
arsenic in it too, a problem that exists for
about 3 million Americans, as about 8% of public water supplies
exceed the current legal arsenic limits. But cooking rice in excess water
and then discarding efficiently reduces the amount of
toxic arsenic in the cooked rice. Yeah, but how much nutrition are you
pouring down the drain when you do that? We didn't know,...until now. “Unpolished brown rice naturally
contains [nutrients] that are lost when the bran layer and germ
are removed to make white rice.” To compensate, since the 1940s, white
rice has had vitamins and minerals sprayed on it
to “enrich it.” That’s why cooking instructions
for white rice specifically say don’t rinse it and cook it
in a minimal amount of water. In other words, the
opposite of what you’d do to get rid of some
of the arsenic. But brown rice has the nutrients
inside, not just sprayed on. For example, rinsing white rice—
like putting it in a colander under running water—removes
much of the enriched vitamins sprayed onto the white rice
surface during manufacture, removing most of
the B-vitamins, but has almost no effect on
vitamins in whole grain brown rice, because it’s got the
nutrition inside. Same thing with iron: rinsing
white rice reduces iron levels by like three-fourths, but the iron in brown
rice is actually in it; and so, rinsing only reduces the iron
concentration in brown rice by like 10%, but rinsing didn’t seem to
affect the arsenic levels; so, why bother? Now, if you really wash the rice,
like agitate the uncooked rice in water for three minutes and
then rinse and repeat, you may be able to remove
about 10% of the arsenic. So, this research team recommends washing
as well as boiling in excess water, but I don’t know if the 10%
is worth the extra wash time. But, boiling like pasta and
then draining the excess water really does cut way
down on the arsenic, and while that also takes a whack
on the nutrition in white rice, the nutrient loss in brown
rice is significantly less, as it is not so much
enriched as it is rich in nutrition
in the first place. Cooking brown rice in large
amounts of excess water reduces the toxic arsenic by almost 60%
and only reduces the iron content by 5%, but does reduce the vitamin
content of brown rice by about half. Here it is graphically. A quick rinse of brown rice before you
cook it doesn’t lower arsenic levels, but boiling it instead
of cooking to dry, and draining off the excess
water drops arsenic levels 40%. That was using like 6
parts water to 1 part rice. What if you use even more water,
boiling at 10:1 water to rice? A 60% drop in
arsenic levels. With white rice, you can
rinse off a little arsenic, but after cooking, you end up with
similar final drops in arsenic content, but the iron gets wiped out in
white rice by rinsing and cooking, whereas the iron in
brown rice stays strong. Similar decrements in the B vitamins
with cooking for brown and unrinsed white, but once you rinse white rice,
they're mostly gone before they make
it into the pot. What about percolating rice? We know regular rice
cooking doesn’t help, but boiling like pasta
and draining does. Steaming doesn’t do much. But what about percolating rice as a radical
rethink to optimize arsenic removal? So, they tried some mad
scientist lab set-up, but also just a regular off
the shelf coffee percolator, but instead of putting
coffee, they put rice, percolating 20 minutes
for white, 30 for brown, and got about a 60%
drop in arsenic levels using a 12 to 1
water-to-rice ratio. Here’s where the arsenic
levels started and ended up. The squares are the brown rice,
circles are the white. So, raw brown may start out
double that of raw white, but after cooking with enough
excess water and draining, they end up much closer. Though, 60%, percolating
at a 12 to 1 ratio, was about what we got
boiling at just 10 to 1; So, no reason to
buy a percolator. But, even with that 60%,
what does that mean? By boiling and draining
a daily serving of rice, we could cut excess cancer
risk more than half from like 165 times the
acceptable cancer risk to only like 66 times
the acceptable risk.