Firstly: I want to point out that the Food Standards Agency does not recommend cutting rice out of your diet, and there are regulations about how much arsenic there is in our food.
They do however make a specific point about not using rice milk as a substitute for breast milk, infant formula, or cow's milk for children under 5.
Go to https://www.food.gov.uk/safety-hygiene/arsenic-in-rice for more information. Or watch this explanatory video.
On to the good news.
In a paper published in Science of The Total Environment (Volume 755, Part 2), researchers from the University of Sheffield and UCLA compared four different methods of preparing rice before using the absorption method of cooking whether this was in a pan, rice cooker or pressure cooker.
The four methods were: not washing the rice, washing the rice, soaking the rice and parboiling the rice before discarding the water.
The parboiling method removed 73% of the inorganic arsenic from the white rice.
The procedure in the paper is as follows
- Into a pan put 4 cups of water for every cup of raw rice, and bring to the boil
- Add the rice and boil for a further 5 minutes
- Drain and discard the water
- Using fresh water, finish cooking the rice using the absorption method.
Finally a huge vote of thanks to HAUS OF PETTY who posted a video on TikTok about arsenic in white rice, that lead me down the rabbit hole of looking to see if there was anything you could do to deal with it at home.