Climate Change Will Make Rice Toxic, Say Researchers (arstechnica.com) 86
Rice, the world's most consumed grain, will become increasingly toxic as the atmosphere heats and as carbon dioxide emissions rise, potentially putting billions of people at risk of cancers and other diseases, according to new research published this week in The Lancet. From a report: Eaten every day by billions of people and grown across the globe, rice is arguably the planet's most important staple crop, with half the world's population relying on it for the majority of its food needs, especially in developing countries.
But the way rice is grown -- mostly submerged in paddies -- and its highly porous texture mean it can absorb unusually high levels of arsenic, a potent carcinogenic toxin that is especially dangerous for babies. After growing rice in controlled fields for six years, researchers from Columbia University and international partners found that when both temperature and CO2 increased in line with climate projections, arsenic levels in rice grains rose significantly. "When we put both of them together, then wow, that was really something we were not expecting," said Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at Columbia University who led the study. "You're looking at a crop staple that's consumed by a billion people every day, and any effect on toxicity is going to have a pretty damn large effect."
Inorganic arsenic exposure has been linked to cancers, heart disease, and neurological problems in infants. Disease risk rose across all seven top rice-consuming Asian countries analyzed. "This is one more reason to intervene -- to control people's exposure," said co-author Keeve Nachman of Johns Hopkins University. "The No. 1 thing we can do is everything in our power to slow climate change."
But the way rice is grown -- mostly submerged in paddies -- and its highly porous texture mean it can absorb unusually high levels of arsenic, a potent carcinogenic toxin that is especially dangerous for babies. After growing rice in controlled fields for six years, researchers from Columbia University and international partners found that when both temperature and CO2 increased in line with climate projections, arsenic levels in rice grains rose significantly. "When we put both of them together, then wow, that was really something we were not expecting," said Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at Columbia University who led the study. "You're looking at a crop staple that's consumed by a billion people every day, and any effect on toxicity is going to have a pretty damn large effect."
Inorganic arsenic exposure has been linked to cancers, heart disease, and neurological problems in infants. Disease risk rose across all seven top rice-consuming Asian countries analyzed. "This is one more reason to intervene -- to control people's exposure," said co-author Keeve Nachman of Johns Hopkins University. "The No. 1 thing we can do is everything in our power to slow climate change."
No brown rice (Score:2)
Rice bran contains six times the amount of arsenic as the rice. It's not a "solution," but not regularly eating brown rice or using rice bran in nutritional supplements is going alleviate the larger part of the problem.
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Too bad because rice bran has a lot of nutritional value.
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Dosis sola facit venenum [Re:By and far the FU...] (Score:5, Informative)
Life dies without enough CO2
Yes, and you will die without enough water, too. That doesn't mean that you can submerge yourself in water for an hour and keep breathing because water is healthy.
There are a lot of things for which you need some amount, but too much is bad. If you think there's no such thing as too much carbon dioxide, move to Venus.
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Let's test that theory on anti-climate conspiracists. In fact, test ALL their claims on themselves.
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keep breathing
Forget breathing it. Your body can't tolerate too much water even when it gets it the intended way - drinking it into your stomach. Too much water there can kill you too.
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Countries are arbitrary lines drawn between populations.
The only reasonable way to look at CO2 emissions is on a per-capita basis.
China is up there, but far from the worst.
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It's the point dummy And also why Americans hate it. It shows how much worse than most people they are. They especially hate that it shows Chinese people are much much cleaner than Americans.
Do they? I would not know, I'm not American, and as you said it is not about countries anyway. I also don't think of CO2 as pollution but rather as a currently necessary byproduct of modern civilization that we will nonetheless phase out over time (read generations, not decades).
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99.99999% of the population falls into this category.
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How so?
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> Comparing Chinese and American per-capita?
Yes, we Americans pollute more. We drive bigger cars and drive more often, have bigger houses to keep climate controlled, and so on.
We are pigs, I'm just the messenger.
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Finally my point got across. Thank You.
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The inconvenient message is: a Chinese city dweller has a higher standard of living than an US-american. No idea about the rural population, though.
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It's basic dimensional analysis.
Comparing 1 Qatar to 1 South Africa is useless.
Comparing 1 person in Qatar to 1 person in South Africa is not.
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You need to factor productivity into things.
If the Qatari generates 3x more economic activity and only pollutes 2x as much as the South African, then they're effectively the smaller polluter.
Unless of course you want to discount productive economic activity, which would just be stupid.
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China would do the same, if it could.
If you took away US natural gas right now, we would build coal plants faster than you could say "but wait, the environment"
China still emits far less per person than much of the Western World (US, Canada, Australia are the big per-capita emitters in the West)
They're 25th worldwide.
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Strange that the population of the USA (about 4% of the global population) consumes 60% of the Earth's resources/energy. The EU and certain regions of China vie for 2nd place and then there is the rest.
China most definitely is a polluter on a global scale, as is the EU, but both cannot hold the proverbial candle against the numbers of the USA. The amounts of heating and cooling McMansions require in the US is staggering. Houses mostly made of wood usually have terrible insulation. And why does every light
Re:FUCKING DUMBEST THING! - Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Informative)
>> Life dies without enough CO2 and the Earth become a frozen hellscape
Brainless remark. Life also dies when there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere and the oceans.
>> we are STILL coming out of an ice-age
Nope, we aren't. We are in an interglacial period that started about 11,000 years ago. The recent rapid warming started when we began burning fossil fuels into the atmosphere.
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>> It's still a period of warming.
It wasn't warming until recently, coward. There had been a gradual decline in temperature over the past 8,000 years.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
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Feel free to write a paper and get it peer reviewed. Good luck. I am skeptical you have the chops to pull it off.
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Depends a lot on who his peers are, doesn't it?
Re: By and far the FUCKING DUMBEST THING! (Score:2)
"The Earth is greener now than it has been in decades"
You clowns keep thinking that coverage is more important than mass, and you're wrong every time.
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Luckily for the Earth, the United States government isn't the only government.
INB4 (Score:2)
It's clearly a conspiracy to kill off all the Asians
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The sky needs DEI training.
What is the mechanism? (Score:2)
Is it higher water temperatures, more acidic water, or something else that is causing it, and is it leaching more arsenic from the rock and soil, or is it just higher concentrations due to water re-use and evaporation?
Re:What is the mechanism? (Score:5, Interesting)
Think of it this way.
Get some rock salt (like big crystal salts).
get cold water and drop some in there.. It will dissolve slowly
then
get warm water and drop some in there, it will dissolve quicker and more diffuse in the water (if you taste the water, it will taste saltier quicker).
And that's basically what;s going on..
And its the same for just about all toxic chemicals (toxic to humans) in rocks and soil.. as the ambient temp rises, it speeds up the erosion of those rocks and chemicals contained in soils..
You dont need Asia for rice ... (Score:2)
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And you think there's no arsenic present in the rocks and soil in the US?
Why would rice grown in the US be any less susceptible to the mechanics of what is happening here?
Re: You dont need Asia for rice ... (Score:3)
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And most Asian countries can grow rice without using flooded paddies. It may be the cheapest/easiest method, but certainly not the only method.
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Some of us Americans care about suffering even among people who aren't American, even the billions of non-Americans who are living in developing countries whose children may grow up shy of their intellectual potential.
Cake, anyone? (Score:2)
Anyone?
Pre-Boiling Removes Some Toxins (Score:4, Informative)
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I expect that Japanese rice cookers will soon have water and drain lines, kind of like an RO system, to handle the draining, rinsing, and refilling as part of the new cooking process.
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Got it, global warming bad. (Score:1, Insightful)
Has the threat of global warming got to a point we can have more nuclear power plants to lower CO2 emissions from energy production? No? Okay, wake me up when you are serious enough about the threat of CO2 induced global warming that you'll allow nuclear power plants to be built. I'm done with any discussion on the problem, I'd like to move to discussing solutions. We know nuclear fission to be a source of low cost, low CO2 emission, safe, and reliable energy. You tell me that cannot be allowed as part
Re: Got it, global warming bad. (Score:2)
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If that's true then why keep bringing up the problem of global warming? Saying wind and solar have been viable at scale for a decade tells me we solved the problem. If the problem isn't solved yet then maybe we need solutions not yet tried.
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Never mind wind and solar have been cheap and viable at scale for a decade now.
So you're saying that global warming is a solved problem? If so, great, but I'm not convinced. I think even with wind, solar, AND nuclear, we're still going to be suffering the consequences of 50+ years of anti-nuclear propaganda.
I'd love to hear some environmentalists announce that wind and solar are now cheap enough that climate change is a solved problem because market forces will take over and price all the fossil fuels out of the market. I certainly see a lot of solar around where I live, but not much
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Re: Got it, global warming bad. (Score:2)
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It's got the ability to take the pressure out of transmission as well, and nuclear can't do that.
Are you saying that wind plus solar plus nuclear will do less to combat global warming than wind plus solar?
Because I've got nothing against wind and solar, I'm in favor of more of both. But I think MacMann has a point, anyone who is opposed to nuclear is saying one of two things:
1) Global warming is not a problem because we've already got it solved without resorting to nuclear
Or
2) Nuclear power is more of a threat than global warming
And given the decades of history we have using nuclear power, including ma
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Personally I think global warming is more of a threat than nuclear and is largely the fault of anti-nuclear "environmentalists" who directly caused the burning of decades worth of coal
That is nonsense.
There never ever was anywhere a kind of plan to install large scale nuclear. The only place where that happened is France.
Burning coal and gas is only a fraction of the problem anyway. 99% of worlds transportation is based on oil, this way or that way.
Abandon all coal plants today, and you still have nearly al
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Has the threat of global warming got to a point we can have more nuclear power plants to lower CO2 emissions from energy production?
Yes, nuclear power is indeed now being advocated as a response to global warming.
No? Okay, wake me up when you are serious enough about the threat of CO2 induced global warming
OK: time to wake up.
It's not 1990 any more.
Mechanism? (Score:1)
Higher temperatures can increase arsenic levels in rice primarily due to changes in soil chemistry and increased arsenic availability. Warmer temperatures can boost arsenic mobilization from the soil into the water, which is then taken up by the rice plants, leading to higher arsenic concentrations in the grain. Additionally, warmer temperatures can affect the soil microbiome, potentially favoring arsenic-loving bacteria that increase the availability of arsenic in the soil.
This is interesting... maybe genetic engineering can help?
While warmer temperatures can increase arsenic uptake, rice plants also have a mechanism to protect themselves. Increased arsenic exposure can trigger the expression of a gene called OsABCC1, which helps the plant move arsenic out of the grain, potentially reducing the amount in the edible part of the rice.
Some rice sources have less arsenic than others (Score:3)
Lundberg conducts regular arsenic testing and publish results. Whole Foods' 365 brown rice has higher levels than other brands. Rice from California, India, and Pakistan mostly has lower levels than from southern US states like Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. I assume this means that you can mitigate the arsenic. It seems like there are various approaches, some better and more thoughtful than others.
https://nutritionfacts.org/vid... [nutritionfacts.org]
GMO time (Score:2)
We should look into genetically engineering strains of rice to absorb less arsenic.
Obviously we should also stop emitting CO2, but even if we were net zero today, CO2 levels would take a long time to decrease, and temperatures would continue rising for a while. And obviously it's going to take some time to get to net zero, so we need to think about mitigating the damage, not focus solely on emissions reduction.
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ShuddupTroll!
Rice should be parboiled (Score:2)
Rice, especially brown rice, should be parboiled (for five minutes in pre-heated water, which is then discarded) to remove arsenic. Though it doesn't remove it all, and parboiling also removes some vitamins, so the discovery in thi article is still a problem.
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/su... [sheffield.ac.uk]
so what are the numbers? (Score:1)
I asked ChatGPT4o to summarize:
Measured Arsenic Levels in Rice Samples (from the study):
Under current climate conditions, the average concentration of inorganic arsenic in rice grains was about 0.15 mg/kg (150 ppb).
Under simulated mid-century climate conditions (higher temperature and COâ), it increased to 0.225 mg/kg (225 ppb), a 50% rise.
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Current Regulatory Standards for Inorganic Arsenic in Rice:
U.S. FDA:
Infant rice cereals: max 100 ppb
No federal limit for general rice consumption
European Union:
Wh