Your Rice Likely Contains Toxic Levels of Toxic Metals!
#42 2025 The Rowen Report
Dear Subscriber,
Thanks for your patience. It has been a hard 11 days for me. I went to DC for just one night, and turned around immediately to return to a fund raiser for Alix Mayer’s Free Now Foundation in Palo Alto, and rushed around the Bay area to see family. Then, just several days later, I went to San Diego for a Rowen Family reunion. These are important to us. My parents started this tradition, and their four children and now grandchildren have continued it. Even better, cousins came. There were some 30 of us at a dinner.
I am back in North Bay now and can catch up, but admittedly the travel got to me. I rarely get sick, and when I do, it is usually linked to long travel. And alas, these trips did get me. Nasty upper respiratory symptoms, only partially relieved by my methods, likely due to lack of sleep. I am well on the downside now.
The Free Now Foundation is devoted to hard and fast actual litigation to end to forced vaccine mandate in California. Terri and I are proud to support it. Del Bigtree was their magnet for the fund raiser and his talk was terrific, as usual for him.
Today’s topic is a concerning one, reported by CNN. Once in a while CNN does bring a topic worthy of thought. Usually, if I hear it on CNN, it just goes out my other ear.
I’m sure you have eaten rice. In fact, you might have eaten, and be eating, a LOT of rice. It is a staple of humanity. I’ve read about the presence of metals in rice for years, especially rice grown in third world countries. But this report was alarming.
100 different brands of rice marketed in the USA were measured to contain dangerous levels of arsenic and cadmium. Some very popular brands were named. One in four samples exceeded safety limits.
In cultures eating a lot of rice, this staple accounted for a huge percentage of the toxic metals in their diet, particularly arsenic. Processed rice products tended to be even worse than rice itself.
Brown rice, while considered more nutritious than white rice, carried more of the metals. Considiering that some peoples of the world eat rice at every meal, there is cause for concern that the most widely eaten food/calorie source should be carrying excessive levels of known toxic metals.
Rice contains far more of these dangerous metals than “ancient” grains like bulgur, amaranth, farro, sorghum, buckwheat, millet, quinoa, etc. However, these may have a bit more cadmium than rice. Overall, their toxic metal burden was found to be significantly less than rice.
Arsenic is a known carcinogen. It may cause cancer by complexing with another sorely needed trace element, selenium, and escorting it out of your body. Selenium is crucial for cellular protection. I will have a major report on it in a future premium section. Interestingly, both selenium and arsenic are toxic at high levels. And either one can antidote the toxicity of the other by complexing with it in your body. This is a recent discovery. Arsenic actually may be an essential trace nutritional metal, but certainly NOT in the amounts seen in rice. Selenium’s toxicity is largely reversible by discontinuing it and is manifested by dry flaky skin and hair loss generally in the presence of overdosing the supplement.
So how do we deal with rice?
The form of the metals in the grain is inorganic, which renders them water soluble. So, you can soak rice in water and drain before cooking to reduce the toxins. Also cooking the rice in excess water, say 6:1 instead of the usual 2:1 and draining the excess water out after cooking will reduce the metals.
The main factors of metal contamination were the type of rice and where grown. California rice will generally have less metals than other sources. Arborio rice from Italy and white rice from southeast US tend to have more arsenic.
“Basmati rice from India, jasmine rice from Thailand and California-grown sushi and Calrose rice (a form of sushi rice) were at or below the 100 parts per billion levels set by the FDA for arsenic in infant rice cereals. However, the Indian basmati and Italian Arborio varieties contained the highest average levels of cadmium.
The California-grown rice had the lowest overall heavy metal content — 65 parts per billion, with 55 parts per billion from arsenic — making it an excellent choice to reduce overall exposure, Houlihan said.”
The above picture is one of several key graphs in the outstanding report worth downloading if you or family are heavy rice eaters, or a youngster is involved. These metals readily cross the placenta making them particularly hazardous for the unborn. I would be quite shy of buying any food grown in China. Even if marked organic, there is no controlling for lead that falls out of the atmosphere from their toxic energy manufacturing industries. We have far greater controls here in America.
I know I am exposed to heavy metals. I grew up in a time of lead in gasoline, so I’ve accumulated it in my bones. I eat some chocolate, a known source of lead. I’ve had intravenous chelation therapy years ago which brought my measurable toxic metals down to a very low level, but metals are notorious for hiding and turning over slowly. We all need to be on a detox program. One thing I do is take an EDTA suppository once weekly – 1500 mg for my size (70 kg) or larger. I also regularly take nutrients that increase glutathione, your body’s key detoxifier, including of heavy metals. Such nutrients include alpha lipoic acid, N acetyl cysteine, selenite (200 mcg daily) and occasional use of a glutathione spray. These are easily available online.
Terri likes rice. She is Chinese. We will now soak cook the grain first for hours, then drain before cooking. Or we will cook in a larger amount of water and drain the excess. Some will warn you that you’ll lose the iron used to fortify the rice. I don’t care about that. Actually, inorganic fortified iron may be toxic in its own right as I’ve reported in the past. I am vegetarian and get no iron from animal products. Yet my iron level as a vegetarian has always been excellent. Iron is easy to overdo with fortified foods and it induces inflammation.
My key suggestion here is not to rely on rice as the main grain staple. Look also to the “ancient grains”. While lectins could be a problem with brown rice and many of the ancient grains. If you tolerate them, I think they may turn out healthier overall for other nutritional content.
To Your Excellent Health,
Robert Jay Rowen, MD
Great article, Dr. Rowen. Thanks for your efforts at bringing usable health information.
In my culture in Africa, the traditional way to cook rice was first to de-stone the portion to be cooked (by hand picking), then to soak the rice in water and wash it, then bring it to boil with an initial excess amount of water, then drain away the excess water; the boiled rice may even still be "washed" again with extra water even after draining away the excess water with which it wash initially boiled.
Then the rice is now cooked with a fresh amount of water till it is done.
In the days when rice (and indeed most grains) were cooked in this traditional procedure, we hardly ever heard of many of the present day chronic degenerative diseases.
Now, everything on the fast lane. Hardly family get to "wash" the rice before boiling, and many no longer drain away the water with which the rice is initially boiled.
Now every chronic degenerative diseases abound us. Rice may not be the only culprit as we have also imbibed much of the SAD diet, fast replacing our traditional ways of cooking and feeding, even for our children. Years ago, I walked into a fast food center early one morning to pick up bottled water while doing a school run, as my wife had been out of town, so I forgot some of her routine. I was shocked to see the number of parents that stood on the queue with their children to buy fast food and soda for lunch (and probably breakfast, who knows). I went out and wept for the future health of my people.
Now, with help of the US "philanthropist" (let him that reads understand) having succeeded in corrupting almost all our crops through the power of the dollar, every chronic degenerative disease (cancer in particular) has become "endemic", even now more prevalent than our malaria with which we have lived for years.
I will lend a voice to the families of my patients to return to our traditional cooking methods, especially of rice.
Forgive my too-worded comment.
Rice is my least favorite grain. I only eat it with gravy (I used to like it with butter occasionally) and maybe only a few times a year, with oxtail and it's gravy from a Jamaican restaurant. I frequently order Chinese food delivered and I'm always throwing the rice away, so for last year I tell them to hold the rice. Saves them a few cents. They also give me about five fortune cookies. I know they're junk food but they are lightweight and used to be good, but often they are are sort of stale now, so those get thrown out too; maybe I'll start telling them not to to give me any of those also. It's going to be tough without the guidance they provide, but I'll have to deal with it.