Welcome to HEAVIES, a spiritual and modern Substack about health and wellness written by Chris Gayomali, a journalist and former GQ editor. This is a reader-supported publication, so consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $5.62 a month if you enjoyed this post or found it useful.
Growing up, my family had white rice with every meal. Being Filipino, this was non-negotiable—unless we were having, say, spaghetti. (And even then…)
One day, when I was in high school, my dad set down a pot of brown rice on the dinner table. Quite naturally this sparked confusion. My brothers and I approached the rice curiously, hovering over the pot as if it were some sort of dazed abductee and we were grey aliens with big heads charged with determining the planet’s inhabitability.
The brown rice was… mostly fine. A little nuttier than what we were used to, and the outer layer of bran meant that it didn’t soak up sauce very well. But I was suspicious. Why was white rice, this thing we ate with every meal, suddenly being demonized in an Asian household? What devil was behind the brown rice incursion?
I didn’t have the language back then to express it, but I always felt there were some weird colonial undertones happening—as if this thing (white rice), the backbone of an entire continent’s food culture, was suddenly bad for you. Which is par for the course in the American health food system.
But white! rice! is! fine! In fact, these days I actually try to avoid brown rice if there are other options available. Here’s why.
Brown rice, in the most basic terms, is just white rice that hasn’t been milled, so it retains the bran and germ layers: the “brown” part. Ostensibly, this gives brown rice a little bit more nutritional value than its fluffier counterpart.
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Here’s a comparison (1/3rd cup) via the USDA:
As you can see it’s not much. An extra 1 gram of fiber? And 0.4 grams of protein? That’s marginal at best. Which sure surprised me, especially since brown rice is often touted as a weight loss tool here stateside. And it’s extra odd since Asian Americans tend to have lower obesity rates (~11 percent) than other Americans.
I called up Julianka Bell, a registered dietician and nutritionist based in Washington, DC, for her take. “White rice is demonized because people see it as stripped of nutrients,” she explained. “People are thinking about it outside of the context of how cultures would consume it.” She notes that Chinese food, in most of the United States, is largely still considered a fast food, your Panda Expresses and whatnot. “White rice is not really considered a health food, which perpetuates the stereotype.”
But the thing that makes brown rice a tricky proposition, she says, at least in the nutrition world, is that it’s higher in heavy metals, like arsenic, which gets drawn up from the soil and stored in the bran and the germ.
There are essentially two forms of arsenic: organic and inorganic, both of which have been used as pesticides. The latter form was ostensibly banned in the United States in 2013, but organic pesticides are still often used today in golf courses, on highway mediums, and sod farms, which then drain into our water systems.
Arsenic has been called the “king of poisons” and was used for assassinations from the rise of the Roman Empire thought the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In 2019, Consumer Reports went through the USDA’s data in an attempt to figure out how much arsenic was still prevalent in our food system—particularly in brown rice—and how bad that might be for us in low concentrations. Here’s what they uncovered:
“For a given type of rice the brown version always had more total inorganic arsenic than the white version, with the brown rice having on average about 80 percent more arsenic than white.”
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According to a report published in Frontiers in Nutrition last year, in response to the Consumer Report findings, the FDA conducted its own assessment of arsenic in brown rice. Here’s what they concluded:
“The data demonstrated that inorganic arsenic concentration is 1.5 times higher in brown rice than in white rice. The expert panel concluded that the risk of exposure and associated health condition(s) increases proportionally with consumption and depends on the type of rice consumed. Notably, the FDA assessment focused on lung and bladder cancer. The expert panel concluded that cancer cases would have increased by 148.6% if rice consumption increased from less than one serving per day, the current level, to precisely one serving per day.”
The Frontiers in Nutrition report also notes that “chronic arsenic exposure through consuming certain foods and contaminated water has been associated with an increased risk of prostate, lung, bladder, pancreatic, and skin cancer.”
That, on top of a host of other reasons, is why I’m sticking to white rice in most contexts: fewer heavy metals, easier to digest, cooks faster, and at least to me, tastes wayyyyyyyyy better.
I’m hardly alone, either. When I interviewed One Championship fighter and MMA coach Jeff Chan for GQ a few years ago, he hesitated before admitting that he eats an ungodly amount of white rice every day, which gives him the fuel he needs to train. (And I mean, look at him!)
“I eat a lot of rice,” Jeff said. “For dinner or whatever I’ll have a nice big plate. I usually have three-and-a-half to four bowls of rice, and then I have just a bit of meat on the side. So as long as I have a lot of rice and it fills me up, I’m happy.”
Thanks as always for reading HEAVIES. New post dropping later this week.
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