Is Your Rice Cooker Poisoning You?

Food safety concerns in China are nothing new. However a recent experiment has demonstrated that a mainstay of Asian kitchens – the rice cooker – may be leaving dangerous levels of arsenic in our diet.

Arsenic is a toxic metal which occurs naturally in two forms: organic and inorganic. Rice absorbs high levels of the more dangerous inorganic form because it grows in water. Until recently it was believed that cooking would remove these toxins from your food. How you cook it, though, turns out to be critical.

Presenters on the BBC TV program Trust Me, I’m a Doctor cooked rice three different ways, then tested the amount of arsenic in the resulting meals. They found that “steaming out,” the method used by rice cookers, eliminates virtually none of the arsenic, because the water in which it’s cooked is all reabsorbed. The only safe method, they concluded, is to soak the rice overnight, boil it in five parts water to one part rice, then wash it before serving. Unfortunately, this also has the effect of removing nutrients from the rice.

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This article first appeared on our sister website beijing-kids.com.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons