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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

I’m a bit annoyed the article doesn’t even bother to touch on whether this is a concern domestically. Are we exporting the bad stuff? Or are we eating it too?

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Rice is going to have higher concentrations of arsenic no matter what. Indian rice has the lowest. It’s very high in Bangladesh so I would never buy rice from there. Chinese rice is also very high in arsenic. The US, Italy and Spain are particularly bad as well. If you buy rice make sure it’s Indian or Pakistani. Japanese rice also has lower levels of arsenic, comparable to India and Pakistan.

What are you basing this on? Is there a place where measurements are catalogued?

They're mostly right.

> White basmati rice from California, India, and Pakistan, and sushi rice from the U.S. on average has half of the inorganic-arsenic amount of most other types of rice.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-muc...

I was unfamiliar with this as well, but found these sources:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187853521... (ctrl-f American)

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-muc...

Research I did when I had my child since we eat a lot of rice. The numbers are readily available, some are listed in this comment thread.

What about the second largest rice exporter, Thailand? This is what I found:

> In comparison, the American rice accumulated the highest arsenic concentration (mean 0.257 mg kg−1) followed by the Thai rice (mean 0.200 mg kg−1), the Pakistani rice (mean 0.147 mg kg−1), the Indian rice (mean 0.103 mg kg−1), and finally the Egyptian rice (mean 0.097 mg kg−1).

So the lowest is Egyptian rice?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187853521...).

Egypt doesn’t really export a significant amount of rice (77th rice exporter in the world, <0.02% of Indian output) so its inclusion is irrelevant here since you will never find it in stores. Its arsenic level is basically the same as Indian rice.

How about Australian rice, like the Sunbrown brand?

Arsenic levels (mg/kg) in raw rice from different countries

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Arsenic-levels-mg-kg-in-...

My understanding is that rice you buy in China, which is presumably Chinese, is generally good for arsenic since the authorities are really hot on it, given the amount they eat. I can't remember where I read this but it seems plausible.

That’s not true. Arsenic levels are geo bound so cracking down on it does nothing. It’s in the soil and the ground water.

This paper suggests it's not too bad: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...

Their acceptable safe amount is 200mg/kg which is considered very high in the rest of the world. It’s a 100% higher than the average amount of arsenic in Indian rice.

You're mixing up milligram and microgram. Their acceptable level is 0.2mg i.e 200 micrograms.

I did but the comment still holds.

"Yes, but". It's possible for large nations like USA and China to grow rice in heterogenous regions and meet domestic demand with rice grown in low-arsenic regions (California), and export rice grown in high-arsenic regions (Texas).

That said, few people trust China to provide good numbers/testing/pro-active enforcement for consumer safety. They are good about applying very tough penalties (including personal executions/death penalty for corporate officers) after quality issues reach a certain level of public outcry. But most issues involve slow poisoning, don't directly kill/maim anyone, and don't reach any level of public outcry, so they go unenforced.

Food safety regulation enforcement is notoriously lax in PRC. People will import baby formula from foreign countries because it's safer.

We’re eating it too. Some brands are better than others. And brown rice is generally worse than white, since much of the arsenic is in the hull.

What are the safe trace levels, assuming zero is impossible to achieve? I'm guessing our rice exports to Haiti are almost 100% white since brown rice is more of a domestic specialty crop (is it eaten much outside of the western developed world?).

Dunno, but we eat Lundberg because it appears to be lower than others: https://info.lundberg.com/arsenic-in-food

Back in the day I hung out with of the Lunderberg kids and they were all in on providing the safest rice.

It is in fact a problem domestically as well, rice is a well-known bio-accumulator of arsenic. This is the reason for guidelines on how much rice pregnant women and children should eat.

Ugh, as someone with celiac disease, I don't have many starch choices. Don't take rice from me!

The recent lead contamination in apple sauce made me glad we have the FDA, but also wonder if the FDA is doing enough. I've ran across some political conspiracy theories about doing away with the FDA and similar organizations, and I think I should appreciate the FDA while I can.

But also, why did it take a bunch of kids getting lead poisoning for the FDA to find that apple sauce had a lead problem? Systematically testing products from the stores seems like a low hanging fruit, one of the simplest and most effective means of regulating the food supply. Is this not happening? What is the FDA doing that is more important than performing regular checks of the food in stores for contaminants?

Maybe I'm a pessimist, but if rice commonly does have unsafe levels of arsenic, I'm not confident that anyone will say or do anything until it becomes a tragedy.

Probably fighting for the budget to do so.

Certain political stances think that companies are the best people to curtail their own behavior. That inspections should never be done by the government.

That no sane company would ever chase short term profit and stock price, over going bankrupt in 5 years, because they killed 1/2 their customers.

So the FDA hasn't the budget to do random pulls I suspect.

Of course, if you think of how many products are on grocery store shelves, pulling and testing 100k? 200k? products a week would be a budget indeed.

The bigger problem is we have a ton of regulatory overhead. The FDA and the USDA are both responsible for checking the safety of different parts of the food supply, and this causes issues. Instead of it being a clear priority for one agency it gets muddled in which agency should be looking at what. Then couple that with the fact that the FDA historically spends more time on drug safety than food safety and the USDA has conflicting priorities in many ways, combined together you end up with some real issues with catching things early and/or before they hit the market

It could be solved by creating a single agency dedicated to food safety and removing the burden from two the agencies that have many other priorities on top of food safety.

That in a tl;dr nutshell is the problem. There is a good overview of these dynamics done by Last Week Tonight that’s on YouTube I recommend for an overview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Za45bT41sXg

This sounds a lot like the justification for creating the DHS to encompass the historically-disjoint agencies. I don't disagree with you, but I worry that the result would end up providing food safety theatre, à la TSA.

I don’t think the theater resulted from the joining of the agencies but rather the change in mindset post 9/11 that led to the merger. Common root cause.

If you’re truly worried about rice consumption levels, you likely can order specialty rice from known locations that has less arsenic

You're dramatically underestimating the amount of work that testing all foods would entail. It would be, at the minimum: every_single_type_of_food * every_production_point_of_said_food * every_manufacturing_point_of_said_food(e.g. restaurants) * every_test_to_run * frequency_to_test_at. That's a wildly exponential function.

So the way the FDA (and most regulatory agencies in the US) works is by researching what they believe to be safe and then requiring companies agree to only use those methods/components. If a company does something else, they are required to provide evidence that they believe it is safe. The FDA then evaluates the provided evidence, rather than e.g. running labs/experiments/etc themselves.

This drives numerous issues. For instance one is a 'generally recognized as safe' exception that allows companies to add entirely new components to their foods without even notifying the FDA. [1] Genetically engineered foods are another big one. A genetically engineered e.g. potato is, from the FDA's definitions, just a potato. And so it there's no further regulatory oversight or safety testing done whatsoever. The only thing they offer is a voluntary 'plant biotechnology consultation program.' [2]

[1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/14/399591292/wh...

[2] - https://www.fda.gov/food/agricultural-biotechnology/how-gmos...

I think removing "every_manufacturing_point_of_said_food(e.g. restaurants)" would suffice, and be would perfectly appropriate. We literally already do this for all exported and imported food. So it's not absurd at all.

Also I think your variable naming is a bit off. Restaurants aren't generally considered manufacturers.

No, they don't. What people think the FDA does and what it really does in general are extremely different. There's a very readable paper here [1] precisely on FDA handling of food imports - that is, if for some reason, you don't choose to believe random internet guy insisting everything most people think they know about a topic is wrong. I don't think it's very purposeful for me to just rephrase the paper when you can read it yourself and get all the details. But, if nothing else, I'll at least quote the lead sentence of the background section:

---

"The FDA’s overall foods program is distinct in several respects from the agency’s other public health regulatory program areas. First—with the exception of food and color additive approvals and premarket notification for certain foods—foods under FDA jurisdiction, whether produced within or outside the United States, do not require premarket approval. Thus, the foods program overall is generally a postmarket program."

---

The FDA does spot testing of high risk foods but otherwise relies primarily on corporations to simply promise that they're following the regulations that the FDA publishes. That's how you get things like lead in apple sauce - it's not something the FDA is going to be checking for. By contrast, they would likely test something like chicken, coming from a region that had a recent bird flu outbreak, for contamination.

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220404/

The other common arsenic bio-accumulator in our food is brassica oleracea i.e. broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and other cultivars of that plant.

That's why just to stay safe, I exclusively eat french fries and ham. Sure my doctor keeps talking about cholesterol and something about the pressure of my blood, but they're just in the pocket of big brassica!

Kidding aside, I really think that a more... "European" for lack of a better word... attitude would do us a lot of good in the US when it comes to food. Our bottled water is full of plastic, our rice and brassica are loaded with heavy metals, and a lot of our food just sucks. Our dairy is sub-par unless you buy the very high end, our meat varies wildly, and you never quite know what you're getting.

But it might put up food prices! Apparently people need the choice to slowly poison themselves with food produced extremely cheaply.

From my experience I think there’s a lot more plastic water bottle consumption in Europe than the U.S.

Depends on country. In the north, no way.

I can’t recall where but I read something about southern US rice (especially Texas) having high levels of arsenic. California rice was reported as safer

On cotton fields lead arsenate was used as a pesticide to kill boll weevils. Some of that land now is rice fields. USA rice is marked Product of USA to differentiate from foreign crop. California grown is marked California to differentiate it from US south grown rice.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2012/11/arsenic...

Or in other countries. It makes total sense for the study to focus on analyzing samples in one market, but turning it into a news story without outside context is misleading - it seems like the story is about Haiti when it’s really about the US.

It mostly isn't a concern domestically. Americans don't eat nearly as much rice as Haitians, apparently.

What constitutes a dangerous level of arsenic in the diet is controversial. First, arsenic is an essential micronutrient similar to selenium, and with a similar toxicity profile. There isn't much science to support the notion that the trace levels commonly found in food and water represent a health risk. Second, the recommended arsenic thresholds set by the government were the product of efforts by environmentalists to make opening new mines impractical by setting the standard below background environmental levels for many types of mining. This was sold under the theory that "arsenic is toxic at any dose" but per the first point, it clearly isn't.

tl;dr: There was a lot of motivated reasoning and not much science behind the food and water arsenic recommended safe levels, and several regions of the planet are subject to significantly higher background levels with no ill effects. You definitely don't want to go out of your way to consume arsenic -- it is toxic at some dose -- but much of the discussion around the level of risk is misleading.

What a gross generalization of what Americans eat. My family eats rice with almost every meal.

Given that, is this a concern domestically? Is it a concern for my toddler?

Of course it is a gross generalization, talking about the diet of any country usually is.

While everyone is focused on rice, the other major bio-accumulator is brassica vegetables such as cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. Many parts of Asia consume large quantities of both plants daily as staples, which suggests that the risk is low in practice.

Your Asia observation is relevant only if Asian levels of arsenic in the soil is comprable US levels, but I always thought levels in the soil in the southern US are an order of magnitude or 2 higher.

> My family eats rice with almost every meal.

I wouldn't say that's typical of most American households though. Ever heard of the Standard American Diet?

America is extremely diverse. There is no “standard diet”.

There empirically is a standard American diet. Of course diversity also exists but it’s insignificant statistically. When this changes you’ll see different food at rest stops on interstate highways. It’ll happen but not very fast.

I think the whole point is that an American who eats a lot of rice is not served by the answer “it’s not a problem, Americans don’t eat a lot of rice”.

I think the people are trying to figure out if arsenic levels in rice will be a problem for them specifically, not our population as a whole. When they say “is that a problem here?” they mean “is the rice I am buying here of concern if I eat a lot of it?”

It’s like the US is literally one of the most diverse countries out there.

Nearly every meal I have has rice.

Don’t buy rice from Texas or Mississippi. The Consumer Reports analysis other people are linking showed the former big cotton states had contaminated many of their rice fields with arsenic from cotton growing.

Naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater is the major source. Lots of parts of the US have pretty high concentrations.

https://publicintegrity.org/environment/arsenic-levels-in-gr...

Arkansas is the big worry here, although Louisiana has some specialty brands (Jazzmen)

As far as I understand there is no actual evidence that arsenic is an essential trace element for humans. There is some data in animals, but not in humans.

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