Why your rice might be risky — and how to make it safer
Assessing Cancer Risk from Wheat and Rice Based Diets in Arsenic Endemic Regions of the Middle Ganga Plain, India: Identification of Hotspots and Risk Reduction Strategies
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Surprising Findings
Certain plant chemicals (benzoic, coumaric, sinapic acids) go UP when arsenic goes up — suggesting the plant’s stress response is tied to toxin absorption.
People assume plants ‘block’ toxins, but here, the plant’s own defense chemicals are actually correlated with more arsenic — meaning the stress response might be helping the poison in.
Practical Takeaways
Rinse rice and wheat with 3x their volume of water before cooking or milling.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Surprising Findings
Certain plant chemicals (benzoic, coumaric, sinapic acids) go UP when arsenic goes up — suggesting the plant’s stress response is tied to toxin absorption.
People assume plants ‘block’ toxins, but here, the plant’s own defense chemicals are actually correlated with more arsenic — meaning the stress response might be helping the poison in.
Practical Takeaways
Rinse rice and wheat with 3x their volume of water before cooking or milling.
Publication
Journal
Exposure and Health
Year
2026
Authors
Pragya Sharma, Sanjay Dwivedi, Sarvesh Kumar, Seema Mishra, Vishnu K. Kumar, Ruchi Agnihotri, Ravi Kumar Tiwari, A. Niranjan, P. A. Shirke
Related Content
Claims (7)
If you soak your rice in water overnight and then throw out that water before cooking, you’ll end up with rice that has less of the harmful arsenic your body can absorb.
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.
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.
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.