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.

In parts of India where the water and soil are naturally polluted with arsenic, rice soaks up way more of this toxic stuff than wheat does—so people who eat a lot of rice are getting more arsenic in their bodies than those who eat wheat.

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.

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 this is just a prediction, not something scientists have actually seen happen yet.

When wheat grows in soil with lots of arsenic, it makes more of certain natural chemicals (like benzoic and caffeic acid) that might help it deal with the poison—so the more arsenic it absorbs, the more of these chemicals it produces.