If you eat a lot of rice and wheat and cook with water that has arsenic in it, computer models suggest you might be over 80 times more likely to get cancer than the average person in the U.S.—but...

Eating rice might increase cancer risk in people from Guyana and Chile because of arsenic in the rice — especially in Guyana, where the risk is high enough to be a real concern.

Washing your rice and wheat with three times as much water as grain before cooking can wash away some harmful arsenic, which might lower your chance of getting cancer if you eat these foods every day.

Scientists found that shorter, stockier types of wheat and rice soak up about half as much toxic arsenic from the soil as the tall, slow-growing kinds—so breeding these shorter crops could help people in dirty areas eat safer food.

Washing and soaking rice helps reduce harmful lead and cadmium to safe levels, but it doesn’t cut down arsenic enough to make it safe from cancer risk.

Eating certain foods regularly that contain a chemical called inorganic arsenic might raise your chances of getting bladder, lung, and skin cancer. For example, it could lead to thousands of extra cancer cases each year in the U.S.