Brown Rice Isn’t Killing You

Why you don’t have to worry about arsenic and brown rice

Pictured: Rice. Lots of rice. Yum. Photo by Łukasz Rawa on Unsplash

There are two stories that we love to hear. The first is that a food we previously thought was terrible for our health is really beneficial. It’s the “chocolate can prevent anal fistula” sort of story, and we love it because we can finally justify the five bars of Hershey’s stacked in our pantry.

Similarly, we are big fans of the story that a healthful food is secretly killing us. If kale was found to cause necrosis of the toe, the media would go wild. We no longer have to feel guilty about avoiding it and bonus we get to feel superior to all those people who ate it for years. Suckers.

Which brings us to this week’s science nonsense. Everyone knows that brown rice is healthier than white, because it contains more fibre, more beneficial nutrients, and because some guy with abs said so on TV that one time. But according to the headlines, brown rice has sky-high levels of arsenic that make it far less healthy than the paler option. Arsenic is a known carcinogen, causes all sorts of nasty health impacts, which means that really we should be avoiding brown rice like the plague.

Right?

Well, no. If anything, the study showed that neither white nor brown rice is much of a health concern. Let’s look at the…