this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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All plants have some amount of arsenic because they just absorb it from the soil, like all the other nutrients they absorb. Rice just absorbs a lot more because the flooded paddies tend to accumulate minerals from the water, including arsenic.
Ultimately, its effects on your health cannot be that bad because if they were, everyone in China (who all eat a bowl of rice per meal) should already be dead or disabled, and they're not.
Yes, that's the whole point of my comment. Ground levels of arsenic in much of the US are elevated because of agricultural contamination, in ways that rice in China, Thailand, and California is not. Most US-grown rice, when tested, is way past acceptable levels of arsenic, to the point where if you're selective about how you cook it, you might be able to eat one serving per week with no negative effects.
But someone getting a rice cooker is likely to eat rice more often than one single serving a week, which means they need to be much more careful about the levels of arsenic and other heavy metals that accumulate in the body.
I did not know the US was especially bad on this. Could you send a link about this so I can make sure I'm not poisoning myself?
Consumer reports did three studies over the last couple decades, one this year I think. There may be others available on scihub or pubmed