re: #3 RealityBasedSteve

Does anybody know if there is a listing of the arsenic levels by brand, or is it a case where petty much all the major processors are getting them from a varity of sources?

I eat rice 3-4 times a week, (a habit picked up when I was married to a red-headed Cajun for a while) and while I am not HUGELY concerned, this is something I’d like to know a bit more about.

On the plus side, maybe the arsenic will kill the bacteria on the chicken. :)

RBS
“Got the rice cooking, now what to fix for dinner” (True quote)

I think brands will say relatively little, as they buy their crop from year to year in different places, and since the rice market is so big, this year’s rice may come from Thailand, while next year’s rice may come from China or the Philippines. If the store gets resupplied, it might come from an entirely different area again.
As (arsenic) levels in the soil can be patchy, so you’ll never know what you get. However, I think china has set the MAC levels to 150ppb, while in the US drinking water is at max 10ppb. In a week you’ll drink at least 14 litres of water, meaning that ~1kg of dry rice (with the China standards, at least) has the equivalent of all the As you’ll maximally get in drinking water (so a worse-case scenario).
Most people will not go through 1 kg of dry rice per week, at least I do not, and I eat rice quite regularly.

I really do not like these sort of sensational titles, and think they are more appropriate for Fox-news like websites.
It is ok to have a debate about levels of bad stuff in our food, but people should realize that plants naturally contain ~5000 different chemicals, and that not all of those are good for us. I guess that Arsenic makes good headlines, but this is just a little bit silly, and there are certainly bigger fish to fry…