THE FATE OF TOTAL ARSENIC CONTENT IN RICE FOR SEVERAL PROCESSING VARIABLES: RINSING AND HIGH VOLUME COOK WATER

This project evaluated rinsing and cooking rice in a high volume of water for several brown and white rice’s, from the United States, India and Iran. There has been more attention to the arsenic content in certain foods, such as apple juice, and regional rice in the U.S. has become an issue as well. The purpose of rinsing or using a high volume of water to cook rice was to reduce the total arsenic content. Previous work on long grain white rice showed a 25% to 46% reduction of arsenic in rice cooked in a high volume of water. This previous work showed no significant decrease in arsenic in rice rinsed in 2 parts of water to rice. This project optimized the procedure of rinsing and cooking rice in a high volume of water from previously presented work. Advances in sampling due to more efficient procedures in sample preparation with emphasis on chilling, grinding and drying prepared rice significantly reduced the relative standard deviation from >10% to 3-7%RSD. Arsenic was measured for total and species (As+3, As+5, monomethyl arsenite, dimethyl arsenate) and the two methods compared within 90% when analyzed by ICP-MS (total) and HPLC-ICP-MS (Species).Results from this project demonstrated an average 45.91% decrease in total arsenic for rice cooked in a high volume of water (1 part of rice to 7 parts of water) and a 50.28% in average decrease in inorganic arsenic for rice cooked using the same procedure. This data provides information on arsenic content in domestic and international rice and provides processing strategies to reduce the arsenic content.M.S. in Food Process Engineering, July 201