
Cook rice in a coffee percolator to avoid arsenic - flarg
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33638321
======
DanielStraight
Original research has much better information:

[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131608)

For example, the far simpler method of soaking and then just using more water
and draining the rice.

> Traditional S.E. Asian methods of rice cooking involved extensive rinsing of
> the uncooked grain followed by cooking the rice in a large excess of water
> and discarding that water on cessation of cooking and this was found to
> reduce Asi content of food by up to 45% [10] and 57% [8] when Asi free water
> was used.

~~~
anishkothari
I was taught to wash rice 3 times and to soak before cooking, especially for
longer-grain rice as it softens the rice.

~~~
meric
I wonder if we'd be here if our ancestors cooked rice in a way that did not
reduce the arsenic content.

~~~
venomsnake
Probably. The human body is mightily adaptable.

------
Bartweiss
Rice grown in the southern US has relatively high levels of arsenic - some
quick math based on UN standards for the developing world says that you could
plausibly eat enough to reach the low end of measurable cancer risk. Most of
us don't though.

If you don't like this answer, eat Asian-grown rice (~75% less arsenic), rinse
your rice (~25% less arsenic), or cook it in substantially more water (~50%
less arsenic).

~~~
geomark
Might need to be more specific about where in Asia that Asian-grown rice
originates. China has a big problem with heavy metal contamination of rice.
One of many stories about it:
[http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/after-
cadmium...](http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/after-cadmium-rice-
now-lead-and-arsenic-rice/?_r=0)

------
johndavi
Arsenic amount depends on where the rice is grown (largely based on historical
pesticide use). [http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-
much...](http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-much-arsenic-
is-in-your-rice/index.htm)

------
ams6110
It may be a British use of the word but the advice is to cook in a coffee
percolator and they illustrate a drip brewer. These are two different
appliances to my knowledge. A coffee percolator is a pot of water with a tube
in the center which directs hot water up and over the coffee. The water
essentially cycles as long as you keep boiling it.

A drip brewer cycles the water once. I can see that being better for rinsing
away impurities but also requiring quite a bit more water.

~~~
geomark
I'm American and a percolator and drip brewer are two different things for me
as well. I used to have a percolater but it's been a long time since I've seen
one. Maybe most people don't know what they are anymore.

------
c5karl
Wouldn't any technique that washes/leaches arsenic from rice also remove
similar amounts of nutrients like essential vitamins and minerals?

~~~
muraiki
A recent Consumer Reports article says:

You may be able to cut your exposure to inorganic arsenic in any type of rice
by rinsing raw rice thoroughly before cooking, using a ratio of 6 cups water
to 1 cup rice, and draining the excess water afterward. That is a traditional
method of cooking rice in Asia. The modern technique of cooking rice in water
that is entirely absorbed by the grains has been promoted because it allows
rice to retain more of its vitamins and other nutrients. But even though you
may sacrifice some of rice's nutritional value, research has shown that
rinsing and using more water removes about 30 percent of the rice's inorganic
arsenic content.

[http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-
much...](http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-much-arsenic-
is-in-your-rice/index.htm)

~~~
dogma1138
Traditional cooking of rice depends on the strain, basmatic / jasmin rice is
and was never rinsed.

Traditionally only rinse rice strains that have a very high concentration of
starch, e.g. Thai white rice or most Japanese rice varieties.

If you don't rinse those types of rice you'll get something similar to
porridge or boiled flour in texture.

------
InclinedPlane
Can we get the USDA/FDA to, oh I dunno, test rice samples for arsenic and put
those levels on labels? Maybe, gasp, even prevent the sale of rice with
excessively high arsenic concentrations?

~~~
jws
In 2012 the FDA was busy doing the science and projecting their risk
assessment for arsenic in rice should be published in 2014. Any limits and
associated testing would come after that.

I don't see the assessment published or an update. Maybe they are still
working, maybe it was canceled.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Probably more like promises of cushy industry jobs if the FDA employees make
the "right" decision to not upset the apple cart.

~~~
zymhan
You know big rice, always throwing their weight around at the FDA.

~~~
InclinedPlane
You think that rice isn't produced by multi-billion dollar corporations that
have spent decades honing their lobbying techniques? Like ADM, Bunge, Cargill,
and Louis-Dreyfus Group, look them up. These are the same guys who are able to
maintain agricultural subsidies larger than NASA's budget as well as
regulations mandating ethanol in gasoline which works out to be just another
kind of subsidy.

~~~
zymhan
I suppose that's reasonable.

------
jqm
Isn't the average lifespan in Japan longer than just about any other country?
And don't they eat lots of rice? I guess I wonder how much of a problem this
really is.

~~~
mikekchar
I don't have official numbers, but this is very likely not the case. Japan
used to have reports of lots of people with incredibly long lifespans. A few
years ago there was a huge uproar when it was discovered that many of these
cases were just pension fraud. The families had a deal with the doctor not to
report the death so that they could continue to receive pension payments. A
quick Google search didn't yield much in the way of results, but I remember it
being in all the news in Japan about 3 or 4 years ago.

~~~
ectoplasm
I find this kind of fraud amusing for some reason, so thanks for sharing.
However, even if there are many cases it can still work out to only a tiny
fraction. Around 1.2 million people die per year in Japan, yet I would call
1000 cases of fraud per year "many".

------
cmurf
Boil it like pasta and strain (fine mesh) after ~15 minutes, back into the
(empty) hot pot and let it sit covered another 5. I just tried this and it the
rice comes out as good as in a rice cooker, maybe a touch fluffier+stickier
(I'm using Calrose).

------
GigabyteCoin
Would that technique not leech out the majority of the vitamins and minerals,
too?

~~~
ams6110
Does rice really have many? Honest question -- I always thought of rice a
little grains of starch.

~~~
mikekchar
USDA has a nutrient database. It isn't always completely accurate, but it is
probably a lot better than conventional wisdom ;-)

[http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/6568?fgcd=&manu=&lfac...](http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/6568?fgcd=&manu=&lfacet=&format=&count=&max=35&offset=&sort=&qlookup=rice%2C+raw)

------
nmridul
Maybe Parboiled rice is the alternative. Here the rice with the husk is first
boiled and water drained off. It also boost its nutritional profile and change
its texture[1]. In many places the par boiled rice while cooking is boiled
again with excess water and the water is drained away.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parboiled_rice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parboiled_rice)

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mobiuscog
Rice cooker.

Easy to cook, and whilst I've no idea how it registers on the arsenic levels,
I'm fairly sure there are millions of people to check against...

------
throwaway8650
Anyone know where Qdoba and Chipotle source their rice from?

~~~
sjg007
Don't order rice in your burrito anything ever.

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nosuchthing
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinoa#Nutritional_value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinoa#Nutritional_value)

[http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/cereal-grains-and-
pasta/...](http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/cereal-grains-and-
pasta/10352/2)

~~~
viewer5
What are you getting at? Neither of those pages mention the arsenic discussed
by the article

~~~
nosuchthing
Quinoa is a great alternative to rice.

More rice science & nutrition:

    
    
      An undergraduate student at the College of Chemical 
      Sciences in Sri Lanka and his mentor have been tinkering 
      with a new way to cook rice that can reduce its calories 
      by as much as 50 percent and even offer a few other 
      added health benefits. 
    
    
      "What we did is cook the rice as you normally do, but 
      when the water is boiling, before adding the raw rice, 
      we added coconut oil—about 3 percent of the weight of 
      the rice you're going to cook," said Sudhair James, who 
      presented his preliminary research at National Meeting & 
      Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) on 
      Monday. "After it was ready, we let it cool in the 
      refrigerator for about 12 hours. That's it."
    
    
      Not all starches, as it happens, are created equal. 
      Some, known as digestible starches, take only a little 
      time to digest, are quickly turned into glucose, and 
      then later glycogen. Excess glycogen ends up adding to 
      the size of our guts if we don't expend enough energy to 
      burn it off. Other starches, meanwhile, called resistant 
      starches, take a long time for the body to process, 
      aren't converted into glucose or glycogen because we  
      lack the ability to digest them, and add up to fewer 
      calories.
    
    

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/25/s...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/25/scientists-
have-figured-out-a-simple-way-to-cook-rice-that-dramatically-cuts-the-
calories/)

~~~
sliverstorm
Nutritionally, it seems pretty good.

But agriculturally, it's hard to grow and has led to a lot of economic damage.
So I've had a hard time justifying a switch.

