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There is arsenic in rice, and it’s generally higher in brown rice than in white rice. Consumer Reports tested 223 samples of rice products in 2012 and found significant levels of arsenic in most of them, including inorganic arsenic (the really toxic kind).

As Consumer Reports found, it’s not unusual to see arsenic at levels of 200 ppb or more in rice-based baby cereals. Click here for the complete test results.

The release of this information freaked out the U.S. rice industry, resulting in enormous pressure being put on the FDA to try to assuage fears that rice products were contaminated with arsenic (which they are).

So the FDA, always working in the interests of food corporations rather than the public, issued a statement saying that yes, there was arsenic in rice, but no, it didn’t pose any “short-term” health risks.

Well, we already knew that. Otherwise people would be dropping dead from eating rice. But what the FDA totally glossed over was the
long-term health risks from chronic exposure to arsenic.

That’s where our real concerns are found, and that’s the issue that the FDA completely ignored. The FDA’s exact language on this is, “agency scientists determined that the amount of detectable arsenic is too low in the rice and rice product samples to cause any immediate or short-term adverse health effects.”