Cooking rice in where percolating cooking water is recycled through condensation
Here all 41 samples of bought rice were cooked in a standard Soxhlet apparatus. Rice grain, fresh from the packet, was accurately weighed (2g) into a VWR Soxhlet thimble and was then placed into an 25cm long and 3.5cm diameter Quickfit Soxhlet which was attached to a 250ml receiving flask at one end and a dimpled Vigreux 25cm condensing tube (14 rows of 3 dimples = 42 dimples in total), with the receiving flask sitting within an electrically heated mantle and supported by a retort stand and clamps. At the start of the experiment the flask was filled with 200ml of double-distilled, deionized distilled water. Rice cooking was timed as per number of Soxhlet reflux cycles, with 3 cycles sufficient to fully cook the rice. At the end of the 3rd cycle the thimble containing rice was removed and rice freeze dried and milled as described for the cooking volume experiment.
It sounds much like a steamer pot or steamer insert. It's like a pot with holes in the bottom that sits on top of your regular pot. People cook tamales in it.
Another reason for doing it is that the bran contains some fat. When you are washing the rice, one technique is to push down with your hand to cause the rice grains to rub against one another. This polishes the rice a little bit more and removes a bit more bran from the outside (including any potentially rancid fat). Unless you have ridiculously polished rice, there will always be a bit of bran on the outside, so it can potentially improve the flavour. I eat a lot of rice on its own (no sauce, etc) and I do find that washing it this way improves the flavour slightly.
Btw, the parts pertinent to our discussion in this video is about arsenic and other contamination in rice and other foods.
He also goes on to make observations about dietary changes in populations in East and far East, but knowing what we know about low-carb diets, those bits may be more controversial. He isn't wrong, he just provides a strong opinion without commenting on other methods of eating healthy =)
Very few medically significant bacterial spores survive boiling temperatures. Clostridium botulinum (botulism) is the common one, and it prefers an anaerobic environment (and other requirements: low salt and low acidity[1] — which is why home fermentation, done properly, avoids the risk) and not a lot of microbial competition, in order to get a foothold.
Even if you ignore the standard recommendations, to refrigerate within 1-2 hours, and to toss refrigerated food after 4-5 days, contamination with less-hardy bacteria is far more likely if the food isn't sealed. You tend to have to go out of your way with unsafe canning[2] or fermenting[3] to get botulism poisoning.
Food contamination is generally the result of airborne or insect-borne or utensil-borne microbes that are far less robust than botulinum. Typical contamination tends to occur after the food has been removed from heat, and has cooled enough so the microbes won't be killed almost instantly. Or, of course, if the food was improperly cooked and wasn't uniformly heated to sufficient temperature in the first place.
At least in the US, the initial processing of rice removes some nutrients, which is why white rice is required by law to be enriched by coating it with certain vitamins and minerals. If you rinse your rice or cook it in excess water such as the paper recommends, you'd be removing the enriched coating, which could put you at risk of certain nutritional deficiencies if you ate a mostly rice-based diet.
3. Yes, you leach out part of the Arsenic for sure, sounds like a "continuous extraction process". Rice contains nutrients and vitamins. How about them?
Waste water? You realize there is a difference between drinking water, "Grey water" and waste water?
Sure, just a few liters of drinking water wasted. Now lets 1.5B Indians, 1.2 B Chinese and a bunch of other Asian countries do this, where people eat rice every day.
TLDW: US-grown rice is among the worst for arsenic, except California. The South is especially bad because of prior use of arsenic-based pesticides used for cotton. Lundberg brand (based in California) has taken a strong stand to be good and transparent and has lots of info on their website.
>Billions of people eat rice daily, but it contributes more arsenic to the human diet than any other food.
so that is in direct contradiction to your claim, according to you, what are then the more significant sources of dietary arsenic? then we can start comparing levels...
There's a definition for "significant source" for each type of food component. The food components for which this is a valid statement are fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, dietary fiber, sugars, and various vitamins.
My comment is sarcasm and intends to indicate that arsenic comes in such an insignificant quantity as to not even be on FDA's radar for even defining levels for reporting on nutritional labels.
Given that (as I have to assume) most human diets are optimized to some extent around the parameter "Doesn't contain much arsenic", something could be the largest contributor of arsenic while still providing too little arsenic to have an effect on health.
Broccoli contains cyanide too. The rice arsenic thing is a bigger deal though. Some enterprising entrepreneur needs to come out with a percolating rice maker.
It’s clearly a sign. Vegetables are tying to kill us. :( apparently bamboo is deadly to humans and only pandas and lemurs (spelling) can eat it raw. It must be boiled for a period of time for human consumption.
Yes, and they were all bought in UK shops or online from UK shops.
> Market rice was purchased from major UK retailers in the city of Belfast, or purchased online through UK retailers, i.e. all products tested were widely available to the UK populace. Of the 41 samples tested in this study 2 were generically labeled as being from the EU, 11 from Spain, 6 from Italy, 5 from Thailand, 5 from France, 2 from Egypt, 1 from Japan, 1 from Australia, 1 from Lebanon, 1 from Pakistan, 1 from Turkey and 5 from the USA; with 13 being unpolished (wholegrain) and the rest polished. Descriptions of samples are given in S1 Table.
I wonder how the boiling method (https://www.saveur.com/perfect-brown-rice-recipe) fares in regards to arsenic, given that: 1. You can use a higher water-to-rice ratio than with traditional methods, and 2. The remaining cooking water is discarded at the end.
I wonder if arsenic in rice is even a true concern. Billions of people across Asia eat it as staple food and the incidence of cancer is usually lower (could be due to low reported cases though).
It depends on the country. The study mentions Bangladesh and (American) rice based baby food.
Not sure about Bangladesh, but arsenic was commonly used as an insecticide in US rice fields in the south, so rice from that region still has some of the highest arsenic concentrations on earth.
In the US rice is less of a staple food (except for infants), so it matters less, I guess.
> In the US rice is less of a staple food (except for infants), so it matters less, I guess.
If it's that way around it's likely to matter more, infants tend to be far more sensitive to toxins than adults. Specifically it can seriously affect brain development, same with lead.
As with all things cancer, you can't easily compare completely different cultures, this is yet another carcinogen, one of the millions of contributing factors to cancer.
Could be that they didn’t use arsenic based pesticides as much or if they did environmental factors/farming techniques removed the ability for the plants to uptake the arsenic. They might also just have less naturally occurring arsenic in their soil.
This is only of interest for the rich. Who can chose low arsenic rice and get government controls put in anyway.
The poor simple cannot spend the time implementing controls that are invisible to them. There's also no way of learning what's really important and what's myth. The rich have enough issues with that.
If anyone wants a list of water wells that have arsenic levels to high that's also easy to get. There exists ways to reduce arsenic in the poor, but it needs work not another academic howto that's just not practical.
63 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadWhat device is that?
Read: https://ggccoffee.com/drip-coffee-vs-percolator/
Cooking rice in where percolating cooking water is recycled through condensation
Here all 41 samples of bought rice were cooked in a standard Soxhlet apparatus. Rice grain, fresh from the packet, was accurately weighed (2g) into a VWR Soxhlet thimble and was then placed into an 25cm long and 3.5cm diameter Quickfit Soxhlet which was attached to a 250ml receiving flask at one end and a dimpled Vigreux 25cm condensing tube (14 rows of 3 dimples = 42 dimples in total), with the receiving flask sitting within an electrically heated mantle and supported by a retort stand and clamps. At the start of the experiment the flask was filled with 200ml of double-distilled, deionized distilled water. Rice cooking was timed as per number of Soxhlet reflux cycles, with 3 cycles sufficient to fully cook the rice. At the end of the 3rd cycle the thimble containing rice was removed and rice freeze dried and milled as described for the cooking volume experiment.
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I am a robot
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I use ---begin---/---end--- because HN has sub-optimal quoting, and pasting from PDF is often terrible.
bleep bloop.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUFe1et8qu8
Poha is flattened or beaten rice. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattened_rice
I do use the 100g rice 100ml water method not sure if adding more water and steaming for longer would work or not.
Very little apparently: https://youtu.be/H_Lui1v2A1M?t=135
Btw, the parts pertinent to our discussion in this video is about arsenic and other contamination in rice and other foods.
He also goes on to make observations about dietary changes in populations in East and far East, but knowing what we know about low-carb diets, those bits may be more controversial. He isn't wrong, he just provides a strong opinion without commenting on other methods of eating healthy =)
Even if you ignore the standard recommendations, to refrigerate within 1-2 hours, and to toss refrigerated food after 4-5 days, contamination with less-hardy bacteria is far more likely if the food isn't sealed. You tend to have to go out of your way with unsafe canning[2] or fermenting[3] to get botulism poisoning.
Food contamination is generally the result of airborne or insect-borne or utensil-borne microbes that are far less robust than botulinum. Typical contamination tends to occur after the food has been removed from heat, and has cooled enough so the microbes won't be killed almost instantly. Or, of course, if the food was improperly cooked and wasn't uniformly heated to sufficient temperature in the first place.
[1] https://jfoodprotection.org/doi/pdf/10.4315/0362-028X-42.3.2...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/Mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6429a6.htm
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5032a2.htm
Sounds to me like a terrible idea.
1. Consumes much more water than needed now.
2. Consumes much more Energy than needed now.
3. Yes, you leach out part of the Arsenic for sure, sounds like a "continuous extraction process". Rice contains nutrients and vitamins. How about them?
Sure, just a few liters of drinking water wasted. Now lets 1.5B Indians, 1.2 B Chinese and a bunch of other Asian countries do this, where people eat rice every day.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4690941/
>Billions of people eat rice daily, but it contributes more arsenic to the human diet than any other food.
so that is in direct contradiction to your claim, according to you, what are then the more significant sources of dietary arsenic? then we can start comparing levels...
My comment is sarcasm and intends to indicate that arsenic comes in such an insignificant quantity as to not even be on FDA's radar for even defining levels for reporting on nutritional labels.
I seem to remember a Bruce Sterling book(Islands in the Net?) where one of the characters avoided vegetables for this reason.
Of cause they try to. It is normal evolutionary behavior of plants. And co-evolution of humans to being able to tolerate this toxins.
In fact, milk and wheat may have compounds, that are addictive.
> Market rice was purchased from major UK retailers in the city of Belfast, or purchased online through UK retailers, i.e. all products tested were widely available to the UK populace. Of the 41 samples tested in this study 2 were generically labeled as being from the EU, 11 from Spain, 6 from Italy, 5 from Thailand, 5 from France, 2 from Egypt, 1 from Japan, 1 from Australia, 1 from Lebanon, 1 from Pakistan, 1 from Turkey and 5 from the USA; with 13 being unpolished (wholegrain) and the rest polished. Descriptions of samples are given in S1 Table.
Not sure about Bangladesh, but arsenic was commonly used as an insecticide in US rice fields in the south, so rice from that region still has some of the highest arsenic concentrations on earth.
In the US rice is less of a staple food (except for infants), so it matters less, I guess.
If it's that way around it's likely to matter more, infants tend to be far more sensitive to toxins than adults. Specifically it can seriously affect brain development, same with lead.
The poor simple cannot spend the time implementing controls that are invisible to them. There's also no way of learning what's really important and what's myth. The rich have enough issues with that.
If anyone wants a list of water wells that have arsenic levels to high that's also easy to get. There exists ways to reduce arsenic in the poor, but it needs work not another academic howto that's just not practical.
Watch Born Sweet it's a good doco on arsenic poisoning from wells - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYhq-dAn3Po