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.

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.

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.

Washing rice before cooking and using lots of water (like boiling it like pasta) removes more harmful metals like arsenic and lead than just cooking it in a small amount of water — so rinsed cooking is better at making rice safer to eat.

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.