Cheap US Rice Contaminated with Arsenic

[jingai]

Is mass-produced US rice grown in contaminated soil a threat to consumers health?

An article in Nature.com says:

Rice grown in the United States contains an average of 1.4 to 5 times more arsenic than rice from Europe, India and Bangladesh, according to a survey of grains from around the world.

This means that people eating a 'subsistence' diet of 500 grams of dry American rice a day are probably consuming more than the maximum intake of arsenic provisionally recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), says Andrew Meharg, a biogeochemist from the University of Aberdeen, UK, and a member of the survey team.

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050801/full/050801-5.html

[ketchupkatsu]

I'd like to know what they would find in Japanese grown rice.

It might very interesting to the results.

[Taro Toporific]

Cheerful Japanese Rice Contaminated with Asbestos
The "White Death(tm)" the polished-to-death Japonica rice is coated with asbestos-tainted talc and grown with green toxic waste oozing onto a rice paddy from a junkyard---the standard Kanto farming practice.

[Blah Pete]

Quite a lot of land in Mississippi and Arkansas that previously grew cotton is now used for rice cultivation, says Meharg.

I think only brown rice and Uncle Bens rice is grown in that area. Most of the Asian style rice in grown in No. California. In fact they grow more rice in No. Californis than all of Japan.