Mzansi is a nation that has a crazy variety of cuisine. And one thing that is commonly consumed across the nation, after wheat is rice.
In fact regions in SA cannot even fathom their daily meals without a bowl of rice.
However, now researchers have found that the bowl of rice we love so dearly could actually kill us in the long run.
Some researchers have discovered that eating a lot of rice spikes the risk of heart diseases due to the naturally-occurring arsenic found in rice crops.
Arsenic in rice
Arsenic is already present in the soil in areas where farmers have used arsenic-based herbicides. Rice when grown under flooded conditions, draws out arsenic from the later and it is eventually absorbed by rice plants. The reason rice is an easy target as the toxins fool the plant, pretending to be other chemicals that fools the plant’s defences.
Researchers at Manchester and Salford university studied the rice consumption pattern in England and Wales in order to find a link between cardiovascular diseases by exposure to arsenic.
They also looked at factors that are known to help in the occurrence of cardiovascular diseases like obesity, smoking etc.
Professor David Polya from The University of Manchester, the co-author of the study, said, “The type of study undertaken, an ecological study, has many limitations, but is a relatively inexpensive way of determining if there is plausible link between increased consumption of inorganic arsenic bearing rice and increased risk of cardiovascular disease. The study suggests that the highest 25 percent of rice consumers in England and Wales may plausibly be at greater risks of cardiovascular mortality due to inorganic arsenic exposure compared to the lowest 25% of rice consumers.”
He added, “The modelled increased risk is around 6 percent (with a confidence interval for this figure of 2 percent to 11 percent). The increased risk modelled might also reflect in part a combination of the susceptibility, behaviours and treatment of those communities in England and Wales with relatively high rice diets.”
Stop eating rice?
While surely no one wants to eat poison, even though it’s delicious, the researchers do mention that more research is needed to confirm a worrying link between consumption of rice and its effects on cardiovascular health.
