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Comment by fallinditch | Hacker News Reader

Using a rice cooker is not the healthiest method due to the arsenic and other carcinogenic substance that rice plants can contain.

Dr Michael Mosley studied the science of this for his BBC program Trust Me I'm A Doctor [1]. The advice is to soak rice overnight, parboil and discard the water, change water and bring back to boil again and change water again, etc.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2F1MDzyW55pg97Tdpp...

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It is funny to me that any time an article or claims regarding rice being unhealthy appear, it would be from some far West country whose diet barely contains any rice. Meanwhile, Asian countries whose populace exclusively eat rice every day, multiple times, in humongous amounts, consistently rank higher in life expectancy than a Western country with the same level of development.

I am not saying rice is the only reason. My point is if rice is so bad, we would not see Japan or Korea or Singapore dominate the life expectancy charts. Compared to the extremely greasy and highly processed food being sold widely in the US for example, rice is extremely healthy.

My ancestors ate a diet heavy in meat, butter and cheese starting about 7,000 years ago. They weren't the first to keep sheep and cattle for food, but they were the first farmers to do so. They're usually called the Germanic peoples, which by the way make up about half the ancestry of modern-day Italians, Spaniards and Scots -- and a larger fraction of the ancestry of the other Western European countries modulo Ireland.

So, I don't think the experience of people whose ancestors have been heavily reliant on rice for the last 4 or 5,000 years and until recently didn't have much access to meat is particularly informative for what I should eat.

  >claims regarding rice being unhealthy

The claim isn't that rice is unhealthy. The claim is that rice can potentially contain high levels of arsenic, which is easily avoidable by modifying the cooking method slightly.

As you say, measurable health effects from arsenic are confounded by the alternatives being largely "greasy and highly processed."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIM_zjCmQ5Y

Well having to soak the rice overnight and reboil it multiple times doesn't seem like an easy method to me.

Also saying rice is filled with arsenic and warn against eating it multiple times a day is not that different from saying it is unhealthy. It almost sounds like fear mongering to me considering how the Asians seem to be doing fine so far and it is the cultures that don't eat enough rice or carbs that struggle with being healthy.

  >Well having to soak the rice overnight and reboil it multiple times doesn't seem like an easy method to me.

Yeah, I'm not sure that's really necessary. Other sources say that simply boiling in lots of water (like pasta) and discarding the excess water is enough.

  >It almost sounds like fear mongering to me

I don't mind, because that's an unrealistic and over-broad standard for speech.

I don't care what it "almost (!!) sounds like," especially after I took care to disabuse the reader of that exact misunderstanding. I care what it is.

Truth > Optics / PR

You can't stop telling the truth just because some people might possibly misinterpret your words (which, spoiler alert, people can always do that), or else you literally can't ever say anything.

Arsenic content is also highly variable depending on where the rice was grown.

Could be simultaneously unhealthy for Westerners and fine for East Asians.

Per the Lindy effect, we should all be eating foods that we're adapted to eating. You are likely adapted to a food if you and your ancestors have been eating it for thousands of years. The longer the better.

East Asians seem adapted to rice and its arsenic content. Northern Europeans, maybe not so much. The former has had thousands of years to adapt and select for rice-eating. The latter, again, not nearly as long. Another example: dairy. East Asians can't digest it, Northern Europeans can.

I don't normally bother to soak rice overnight. I believe you can get rid of most arsenic etc by changing the water once or twice during the boil. A final rinse in hot water before serving is good.

I mostly eat long brain brown rice which contains more contaminants in the bran and so this purification method is important to reduce one's intake of bad s*t.

Eating organic rice is good but doesn't mean it's uncontaminated.

Could you buy organic rice instead?

Organic rice still has arsenic. The arsenic is not coming from pesticides, but from the soil and water, which naturally carry some arsenic.

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