Why you should know:
Arsenic is a carcinogen and has various other negative health effects; enough to warrant exposure limits in various jurisdictions. A five minute boil-and-discard step before cooking is a simple way to reduce your exposure, especially if you eat a lot of rice.
Details are in the study, linked in the title of this post. Here’s a diagram from the abstract:
Yeah, took me a while to get through that paper. Pretty detailed, but a little red flag kept waving when all the results are percentages. I finally got down to the meat of the science and was pretty confused on actual levels. I still don’t have a good grasp of exactly how much iAs they measured, as the findings are adjusted for relative exposure by body weight. I suppose that’s the point of the paper, but would have been nice to have some relatable baseline to put things in perspective.
There is also a pretty large margin of error as a exposure 2.75x greater than used to calculate the results was within the same exposure limits linked to the 0.1% risk. That’s easy to add to their charts. Would have been nice.