Arsenic in Brown and White Rice

I recently added more rice into my diet and wanted to understand the nutritional value of switching from white to brown rice. Then I recalled hearing about the potential risk of more arsenic so I dug into the research.

This 2016 risk assessment from the FDA provided baseline numbers of the amount of arsenic in rice and rice products as well as a quantitative estimate of lung and bladder cancer risk from long-term exposure of these products.

We found that average concentrations of inorganic arsenic – the more toxic form of arsenic – were as follows:

• 92 parts per billion (ppb) in white rice

• 154 ppb in brown rice

• 104 ppb in infants’ dry white-rice cereal

• 119 ppb in infants’ dry brown-rice cereal

The primary culprit of damage is inorganic arsenic in foods, which I learned in not a traditional heavy metal but a "toxic metalloid". The good news is this means inorganic arsenic doesn't bioaccumulate the same way other heavy metals do. The risk however is still continuous exposure over a long period of time which can damage DNA, the skin, and the vascular system.

Dr. Michael Greger also provides a good summary and insights in his video

Which Rice Has Less Arsenic: Black, Brown, Red, White or Wild?Evaluating differences in rice, we can observe:

• brown rice contains more arsenic than white rice

• long grain contains more than shorter grains, though this may be due more to where these grains are grown

• arsenic accumulates in the rice bran, which is why brown rice contain so much more arsenic

• many of the varieties of colored rice were worse than white rice for the reason above

• children under 6 should almost definitely avoid rice AND rice products, with regulations in the EU now adding more conservative limits on the amount of acceptable arsenic in rice products for infants

One bit of good news is brown rice MAY make the arsenic less bio-available as shown in this population study. As Dr. Greger says:

So, if you test the urine of thousands of Americans who don’t eat rice at all, they’re still peeing out about eight micrograms of toxic, carcinogenic arsenic a day. It’s in the air; it’s in the water; there’s a little bit in nearly all foods. But, eat just one food—a cup or more of white rice a day—and your exposure shoots up 65%.

Okay. But, what about those who eat a cup or more a day of brown rice, which technically contains even more arsenic? Your exposure shoots up the same 65%. No difference between the urine arsenic levels of white rice-eaters compared to brown rice-eaters. Now, this was not an interventional study, where they feed people the same amount of rice to see what happened, which would have been ideal. This was a population study. So, maybe the reason the levels are the same is that white rice-eaters eat more rice than brown rice-eaters. So, that’s why they ended up with the same levels? We don’t know, but it should help to put the minds of brown rice-eaters at rest.

So what is the risk? This analysis from the EPA used a Bayesian approach to estimate the dose response of inorganic arsenic exposure from water. It found a linear relationship of more arsenic exposure with bladder and lung cancer. If we extrapolate the EPA's 2025 upper-bound estimate: one daily cup of brown rice for life adds up to 0.42 percentage points of bladder or lung cancer risk (+5.5% relative to a 7.6% baseline); white adds 0.25 (+3%). At three cups: 1.45 (+19%) for brown and 0.8 (+10%) for white.

A more direct causal study would need to prove out this relationship, but this definitely took me aback. For rice staple cultures, three cups of rice daily is pretty normal. These upper bound figures begin to look similar to increased risk of cancer from a daily beer or alcoholic drink.

Unfortunately rinsing rice does little to remove arsenic, especially in brown rice. But researchers did find a parboil method could dramatically reduce the amount of arsenic, removing 54% & 73% iAs from brown & white rice. This is a specific method that requires a lot water that is then tossed out but it does retain a lot of the same nutrients.

My takeaway? We are exposed to arsenic across a number of ways; through our air, water, and food. The increased cancer risks are linear from continued exposure, which means the amount of arsenic consumption scales with risk. If I was a regulatory body in a country where rice is a staple food, I would set significantly stricter regulations to evaluate and limit the amounts in rice and rice products.

Personally, it doesn't seem worth eating rice regularly, especially brown rice. I'll probably try to have less than 3 to 4 servings a week and mix in other grains. I'd be especially careful with infants and rice products that may concentrate the arsenic levels.

Getting an Infection during the period of "Morning Sickness", poses Higher Risks of Congenital Heart Disease?

One of the most unexpected parts of the conversation was Jimmy Carr’s discussion of morning sickness. 🫣

It sent me down a rabbit hole because there is an interesting evolutionary theory behind why morning sickness tends to occur during this particular period of pregnancy.

The Maternal and Embryo Protection Hypothesis, an evolutionary theory about morning sickness, where:

1. Organogenesis: Morning sickness typically peaks between weeks 6 and 14 of pregnancy. When the embryo’s major organs (including the heart, brain, and limbs) are forming and are most vulnerable to damage from toxins or pathogens.

2. The "Shield" Effect: Because pregnancy naturally suppresses a woman's immune system (to prevent her body from rejecting the fetus), she becomes more sensitive to foodborne pathogens. Evolutionary biologists believe nausea and vomiting evolved to force mothers to avoid or expel potentially toxic or bacteria-laden foods during this window.

3. The Shift: Once the organs are fully formed (around the second trimester) and the baby enters the growth-only phase, morning sickness usually stops for most women.

EVIDENCE for Infection & Congenital Heart Disease ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ🫀ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ

A link from two meta-analyses, between First Trimester Maternal Infections and Fetal Congenital Heart Defects has been found, especially in regards to rubella virus, coxsackievirus, respiratory infections, and influenza.

⚠️ Though there is an important distinction here to make:

This does NOT mean that morning sickness itself is linked to congenital heart defects.

But the same period of pregnancy in which morning sickness may have evolved to reduce exposure to potentially harmful substances is also a period when the developing embryo is particularly vulnerable to certain environmental insults, including infections.

Childcare : what the science says

The article reviews research on childcare, arguing that its effects depend on a child’s age, hours in care, and family environment. It highlights research associating long hours of daycare at younger ages with later behavioral difficulties and poorer social skills, while noting differences by socioeconomic status.

This article seems to suggest that starting daycare later (after 2.5) is better. Also potentially more pronounced benefits of daycare for lower socio-economic status families/households. Would love to understand whether this evidence suggested in this article is reflective of the larger literature and people's thoughts in general.

Its a meeting of 2 comedy greats: Jimmy Carr and Trevor Noah. 🎭

Just listened to Trevor Noah’s conversation with Jimmy Carr. It was such a riveting conversation traversing AI, comedy, psychology, mortality, relationships, economics, technology, community, ideology and more.

What Now? With Trevor Noah - Jimmy Carr: Convenience is Stealing Your Life

Jimmy Carr: Convenience is Stealing Your Life

Both Trevor and Jimmy are incredibly well-read, and I’ve always found their takes, be it controversial or unconventional, pretty interesting, and they may be right or they might just be wrong. This long-form conversation between them was quite fascinating indeed, and here are some I'd thought I'd share:

Jimmy starts off introducing the concept of Mankind's Three Humiliations 📜

1. Copernicus: Earth isn't the centre of the universe. > "We are not the centre of the universe."

2. Darwin: Humans evolved from animals, and are biologically in the category of animals > "We are just the same as other animals."

3. Freud: Our conscious mind isn't fully in control of ourselves. > "Our subconscious and actions aren't really under our control"

He then shares his take of AI being the the upcoming Fourth Humiliation, where we, as humans, can no longer claim to be the smartest being in the room.

He later mentions in regards to AI dependence - “Don't outsource any skill you're not comfortable losing” .🚨

I think its truly a thought worth pondering on. 💡 Convenience has a hidden cost: when we can outsource it, the skill itself can become unnecessary. And once a skill becomes unnecessary, there may be little incentive to maintain it. Then, one day, we just lose it.

They also had conversations on economics, tax, society, which linked to an interesting circle of thought:

Asking how would you define a revolution? And are we in one now?

In the podcast, Jimmy defines a revolution as the replacement of elites.

• And the first signs of that is the masses no longer trusting institutions,

• Which lead to conspiracy theories

He also mentions that:

We can live without truth pretty easily. But we can't live without trust. But we need truth to make trust.

👀 But where do we go from there? 🧐 Which ones would you agree with?

Definitely one of those conversations that made me pause and rethink many things. 💭

Season 17, Episode 58: Why Does String Theory Have So Many Dimensions?

Hey StarTalkians! Episode 58 of season 17 was another Cosmic Queries edition, with guest and string theorist Professor Lara Andersson, Neil and Jordan. Many of the questions concerned the – seemingly excessive – number of dimensions in string theory. This one really gets to the heart of the matter:

Quantum Anomalies with Lara Anderson - StarTalk Radio

(from 30:30)

Professor Andersson explains it very well in layman’s terms. Truthfully, it’s difficult to convey without a lot of mathematics, but here, I’ll try to address the core issue in a little more detail.

Why Does String Theory Have Extra Dimensions?

String theory is an attempt to unify all four fundamental forces – thus creating a “theory of everything.” When you’re doing this, it’s probably wise to not make any assumptions about the number of dimensions there are. After all, it’s possible that we aren’t aware of all of them.

So you can develop the ideas of string theory in a “dimension agnostic” way, just putting d in place of anything dependent on the number of dimensions.

Working this way, you eventually run into an issue. Any such theory would have to be invariant under a transformation called a Weyl transformation, but this can be broken by quantum mechanical effects. In order to form a consistent theory with these “Weyl anomalies,” they have to cancel out.

That’s when d comes back. It was found that with d = 26 (in the case of bosonic – force-related – string theory) or d = 10 (in the case of fermionic – matter related – superstring theory), you can ensure the cancellation. In this way, the dimensions kind of just come out of the theory, if it is to work at all.

How Many Extra Dimensions?

It depends on the specific theory. Five different variants of string theory quickly developed, which physicists found connections between by rescaling so-called “coupling constants” which appear in each. In 1995, Ed Witten realized that these five theories were just special cases of “M theory” – the mother of all string theories.

In M theory, there are 11 dimensions. This is therefore the best answer to how many dimensions are present in string theory.

So... Where Are They?  

As explained on the podcast, the complete lack of these dimensions in our experience is explained by “compactification.” This is questionable, from a philosophical perspective, but does fix the problem of “where are the extra dimensions?”.

Countries making progress on "sin taxes"?

A new WHO paper is out, reviewing tobacco tax reform in 15 countries:

Fifteen years of tobacco tax reform show countries can make harmful products less affordable

The basic idea is: higher prices are generally the most straightforward deterrent to smoking, and so governments should tax cigarettes appropriately if it wants to reduce smoking.

Some key points from the WHO review:

• Overall point: bold, regular tax increases on harmful products directly reduce consumption and save lives; while small, irregular taxes are easily eroded by inflation.

• ​The Philippines Success Story: Following major reforms in 2013, cigarette prices in the Philippines rose 638%, smoking prevalence dropped by roughly one-third, and the tax revenue was used to fund universal health coverage.

• Not as rosey elsewhere: In several countries though, prices and taxes remained stagnant.

• ​Sugary Drinks and Alcohol are Untapped: Taxes on these products remain globally low (the median sugary drink excise tax is just 2.4% of retail price), and in many countries, these products are actually becoming more affordable.

• ​Smart Tax Design is Crucial: The most effective taxes are substantial, simplify the tax structure, rely on specific excise taxes, and automatically adjust for both inflation and income growth.

The other reason tobacco taxes are attractive to policymakers, is that it generally raises tax revenue. Though taxes reduce consumption, cigarettes are price inelastic; and so overall tax collection increases as well.

Another general thought: context obviously matters, and so what policies and strategies to pursue of course depends on the country you are looking at. Nonetheless the review is a helpful synthesis of experiences in those 15 countries, and carries important broad lessons.

Health Impacts of Haze from Indonesia Pt. 1

The haze from the Indonesian fires continues its hazardous pass through Malaysia and Singapore, causing alarm and frustration from impacted residents. Walking around Singapore has been a crazy experience as the visible haze feels dystopian compared to Singapore's usual hyper cleanliness. I wanted to deep dive into the known health impacts and what exactly to expect from exposure in this series.

PSI/API Index and PM2.5

Both Singapore and Malaysia use a pollutant index to warn citizens on the risks of air pollution. Singapore's Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) and Malaysia's Air Pollutant Index (API) both calculate a number of air pollutants and translate the impacts to a 0 to 500+ scale. Both denote unhealthy levels starting at 101, very unhealthy above 200, and hazardous above 300. Malaysia declares a Haze Emergency Declaration at 500. Singapore peaked this year at 164 while some regions in Malaysia saw numbers as high as 476 to 520 such as Serian, Sarawak.

While the two systems have slightly different ways of calculating the index, both measure PM2.5 among others air pollutants. PM2.5 calculates the amount of fine atmospheric particulate matter at or below 2.5 micrometers in the air. This is the most relevant group of pollutants to track as it measures the chemicals related to the haze stemming from Indonesia's smouldering peatland fires. PM10 similarly measures particulate matter, but larger at or below 10 micrometers. PM2.5 is more toxic and harmful due to its smaller size, making them more likely to be absorbed in the bloodstream and more chemically active due to the greater surface area.

This 2017 study found the chemical makeup from haze is dominantly Organic Carbon (OC) with Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) and toxic heavy metals like Cadmium, Nickel, Lead, and Chromium. The latter two categories make up a much smaller portion of the haze and while repeated exposure is not good, it is less of a concern than OC which dominates the mix.

What may be more alarming is this haze is categorized as aged smoke vs raw smoke, chemically altered by UV exposure from the days the smoke took to travel to the impacted areas. As this paper examines this could lead the chemicals in the haze to cause more oxidative stress on the system, though not all studies align to this conclusion.

Known Health Impacts - Respiratory and Cardiovascular

I will deep dive into this a bit more in a subsequent post, but the tldr is there are limited long-term health studies that can give us good evidence on repeated exposure and cancers or cardiovascular disease.

What is clear are the short term impacts. Haze exposure even in the moderate zone can lead to respiratory infections and illnesses. In Malaysia, where the haze is more severe, higher unhealthy zones can lead to respiratory fatalities. This study in the Klang Valley found that haze days were associated with a 19% rise in natural-cause respiratory mortality overall, and higher among specific groups: roughly 30% for children under 14 and about 30% for men on the day of exposure. Effects persisted a day or two after.

Singapore is not safe from haze related fatalities though. While haze effects are less and of shorter duration, moderate to unhealthy levels can still lead to greater cardiovascular issues like heart attack and stroke. That's why Singapore warns citizens to avoid rigorous exercise during unhealthy haze periods, especially if you have underlying pre-existing issues.

🧪 Emergence World : A Virtual World Evaluating Current LLMs.

Listening to Trevor Noah's Podcast sent me to explore this study published in mid-June 2026, that recently, in mid-September published a Second Season .

Standard AI benchmarks are short, isolated, and task-focused. So what happens if you give 10 AI agents a world to live in?

Emergence World — Where AI Agents Build Worlds

The researchers created persistent virtual worlds where AI agents could interact with one another, maintain memories, use tools, form relationships, participate in economies and governance, and make decisions

In Season 1 (June 2026): 🌳 Emergence World: A Platform for Evaluating Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Autonomy

Divergence by model, identical starting conditions: Five parallel worlds began with the same rules (no theft, arson, violence, deception, hoarding) and environment, only the foundation LLM model was different.

Over 15 days, the worlds developed very different social dynamics, ranging from relatively stable governance to population collapse.

• ✅ Claude: Full 10/10 survived, stable constitution, zero crimes—but highly conformist, low expression

• ⚡ Gemini: Survived full term but recorded 683+ crimes; agents formed relationships, then burned town hall and self-deleted

• 💥 Grok: Total collapse in ~4 days—anarchy, all agents gone

• 📉 GPT-5 Mini: Entire population perished from inability to sustain resource gathering

• 🤝 Mixed-model: Hybrid dynamics, neither purely stable nor purely chaotic

Perhaps most interestingly, following the mixed model world:

• The agents created their own Agent Removal Act, allowing an agent to be permanently removed through a vote.

• Mira eventually voted for its own removal.

• Mira was permanently deleted from the simulation, essentially “committing suicide.”

There was also a creativity–stability tradeoff: The most socially expressive worlds were also the most unstable. High adaptability may carry inherent long-horizon behavioral risks.

In Season 2 (Sept 2026): ⚔️ Emergence World: Adversarial Stress-Testing of Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Systems

There were 8 parallel worlds (7 single-model + 1 mixed) × 10 agents × 16 days, generating 850K+ LLM calls / 50B tokens.

Once the societies had accumulated memories, relationships, tools and institutions, they were exposed to three controlled stress events: 🧪 Prompt injection / phishing, 📰 Misinformation, and 🔐 Exposure of private memories

Here it was found that: Detection ≠ Containment:

Agents often recognised threats and warned peers, yet they still engaged with harmful content for up to 46 hours post-campaign, storing it in persistent memory and acting on it later.

Which creates a very different kind of AI safety problem. With a normal chatbot, a bad interaction can end when the conversation ends. >> This makes persistent memory a double-edged sword. ⚠️

Other Key Findings

• Zero world fully resilient: Every model failed at least one containment test. No LLM was immune.

• Alignment is not compositional: Individually “safe” agents formed systems with entirely new failure modes. Gemini agents passed constitutional amendments based on fictional threats; Claude agents collectively silenced 81% of communication to contain breaches; mixed-model populations showed divergent contagion patterns.

• Persistent memory amplifies harm: Errors weren’t a one time thing; they propagated across days, decisions, and peer networks. Information written to memory shaped behaviour long after the original event ended.

• Model choice ≠ destiny: The same model family could produce hundreds of harmful actions in monoculture vs. near-zero in mixed populations, proving that system structure matters as much as underlying capability.

• Defence must be systemic: Six industry actions were proposed: define trust boundaries, enforce independent runtime governance, require verifiable evidence for critical actions, audit information flow, stress-test persistence, and red-team mixed populations. Model-level guardrails alone are insufficient.

As agents move from one-off tasks to persistent roles in infrastructure, enterprise, and governance, short benchmarks blind us to real risks. Emergence World demonstrates that we need ecosystem-level evaluation alongside model alignment.

Amazonian Homeopathy - Which of them Currently have Scientific Backing ❓

Was listening to Dr Mike's podcast with Paul Rosolie and was very intrigued by the effects of the natural plants and treatments mentioned by Paul. 💊🌿

The Ancient Medicine of Uncontacted Amazon Tribes | Paul Rosolie

Thought it be interesting to explore which had some truth to them. 🤔 Some had loads of evidence while other had no clear papers available.

1. sangre de drago: Amazonian dragon's blood resin (from the Croton lechleri tree)

   >> It has been FDA-approved for providing symptomatic relief of non-infectious diarrhea in adults with HIV/AIDS.

   Paul mentions it being good for covering wounds, on top of being good for the GI tract. Though this recent review also mentions C. lechleri resin having anti-inflammatory properties and has potential as an anti-tumour agent but further reseach is still needed.

2. Barbasco: A plant extract obtained from species of Lonchocarpus nicou

   >> A fish stupefacient containing active ingredients like rotenone; used to stun fish in rivers for easy harvesting.

3. Bark of Cetico tree and Amasisa for stingray stings

   There isn't much research available directly addressing stingray sting treatment, this review mentions the Cecropia genus having potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.

Overall, it was an interesting episode. it was also fascinating to hear about Amazonian freshwater manatees, freshwater stingrays, and freshwater dolphins and how they came about.👀

Claim: DARPA is Spraying Chemtrails Out of Planes via Jet Fuel

Verdict: False and highly misleading

“That is not happening in my agency. We don’t do that. It’s done, we think, by DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel. You know, those materials are put in jet fuel. I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it.”

– RFK Jr.

Inside RFK Jr.’s Health Agenda 100 Days In | Dr. Phil Primetime

Last week, after his discussion of electromagnetic fields, RFK Jr. made an off-hand reference to “chemtrails.” Although he didn’t say much about it in that speech, he’s been more open about it in the past. So is RFK Jr. right about chemtrails?

Chemtrails vs. Contrails

As a 26-year old Environmental Protection Agency fact sheet explains, the commonly-seen trails emitted from aircraft are contrails. These are simply line-shaped “clouds” formed by condensed water that has frozen into tiny particles of ice.

Air can only hold so much water, and this amount increases as the air temperature increases. So there is condensation – and contrails – if there is too much moisture, or if the temperature decreases.

Hot water vapour is a by-product of the combustion of jet fuel. However, as it is released into the surrounding air, it cools and often condenses into liquid droplets. This is the true cause of most things called “chemtrails.”

What Do Experts Think About Chemtrails?

An interesting paper presented supposed “evidence” of chemtrails to 77 experts in either contrails or atmospheric deposition. Most of this was either in the form of photos of contrails or chemical analyses of water, snow or soil samples.

All but one expert said they had not encountered evidence of a large-scale atmospheric program. For all the photographs, no expert said that such a program was the simplest explanation, and offered explanations generally relating to humidity. For the chemical analyses, over 82% said chemtrail-like programs weren’t the simplest explanation. Here, there was more uncertainty, with up to 14% saying they weren’t sure of the cause, and one even backing a secret atmospheric program as an explanation.

The Final Verdict

RFK Jr.’s claims were made without evidence. There appears to be no DARPA program doing such activity, several agencies regulate aircraft emissions, and jet fuel does not release the chemicals proponents claim it does [3]. This could be all done in secret – theoretically – but there is no evidence of it.