Did you/do you eat rice while pregnant?

[tallulahfallulah]

Just been reading about rice being high in arsenic. I don't eat it very often but I have had those little mini packs of rice krispies 3 times this week and feeling worried it's bad for baby! Did you still eat rice while pregnant?

China

I am pretty sure people in China/India/Mexico etc manage to have perfectly healthy babies on a fairly regular basis.

There will have been a few born while I was typing this.

Nothing to worry about.

Yes, big steaming bowlfuls. Unless you poured the arsenic over it yourself this is not really a concern.

I do...and I reheat it too!

Rice is absolutely fine but @RosaBaby2 reheating it is really not recommended, even if you weren’t pregnant it’s a big no-no. It’s not like reheating other food

Are you feeling overly anxious in general? Surely rice being the staple diet of a large part of the world’s population would put your mind at ease :)

Reheating rice is fine as long as it was cooled quickly and put in the fridge the first time it was cooked. It should then be reheated until piping hot. There is no advice saying to avoid it on the nhs website

Nhs food advice is good to follow. Don't worry about rice. As said above, huge sections of the world population have it as a staple part of their diet and it's fine.

Also reheating it is fine as long as you do it properly.

www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/can-reheating-rice-cause-food-poisoning.aspx?CategoryID=51

Rice, reheated Rice, rice dropped on floor and picked up AND reheated, Rice with soft cheese and patè, rice in a hot bath, rice with an occasional glass of wine...

I was a shit pregnant person!

If I didn't have gestational diabetes, I would eat rice until it came out of my ears. Mushroom fried rice. Risotto. Red rice and feta salad. Forbidden rice with avocado, mozzarella and fresh chilli.... I bloody loved rice.

Haven't had it since I had DD over 2 years ago. Stupid stupid stupid glucose, stupid pancreas. Eat it and enjoy, OP!

Yes, definitely, and I also eat it as leftovers/reheated which some people are nervous about. It is higher in arsenic than other foods, but you'd have to be eating ridiculous amounts to be too concerned. If you think about people who are gluten free (who eat high quantities of rice based carbs), it obviously hasn't done them any harm. I don't naturally eat it more than one a week though anyway.

I eat a lot of rice based products as well as rice as I cannot eat gluten. From memory, the arsenic issue is linked to certain types of rice more than others and you can limit the amount of residue if you soak it for a while in cold water and then rinse it before you start cooking it and ensure to cook it in freshly drawn water (not the water you soaked it in obviously).

As others have pointed out, there are places where wheat is not eaten in vast quantities where rice is the main staple carb-wise and perfectly healthy babies are born all the time.

Yes....lots of it!

If it worries you, you can soak the rice for a few hours before cooking it, rinse with lots of cold water, cook with lots of water, drain then rinse with boiled water. It gets rid of any traces of arsenic. And really, it's only minute traces and it's absolutely fine even without soaking/rinsing.

@BigBaboonBum thanks I know everyone's crazy about reheated rice, that's why I mentioned it. As long as you cool and it correctly it's perfectly safe.

Yes. I also livewhere there is a very high incidence of arsenic naturally in the water. Ds is fine...

Absolutely fuming about all the left over Chinese I could have been eating but threw away instead

I heard a R4 programme about this last year. The issue of rice being relatively high in arsenic is nothing new. The plant absorbs it easily. The issue of human toxicity has arisen more recently, where the trend has become to cool it in a small amount of water until all the water is absorbed. The programme was saying that the traditional method is to cook rice in 3 or 4 times its own volume of water, which is then drained away. This keeps Arsenic levels down to very dilute concentrations that are not hazardous to human health. (This is certainly the way I remember and mother and grandmother cooking rice).

It’s worth bearing in mind that the soil in much of Cornwall has high background levels of Arsenic. Watch out for Cornish root veg!

Rinse it first if you’re worried.

I eat rice without worry, although I don’t reheat it.

I wouldn't eat anything that was known for causing food poisoning if I was pregnant, but this is because I had it at about 25 weeks and it was horrendous.

Opinion of the doctor who came to see me and check on the baby was that being pregnant, I was hyper sensitive to any iffy food, hence the violent reaction I had to it (reheated rice, funnily enough, although nobody could be 100% certain that this was the culprit.). My body was getting rid of the potential nastiness, basically, to protect the baby.

Nothing to do with arsenic though.

What on earth do you think they do in the huge areas of the world where rice is the main food? Stop eating?!

They cook it in a lot more water than has become the norm in Europe smerlin.

I've eaten rice, yes, I'm also very in to cocopops at the moment so similar to the time crispies you've noted in your OP. Im not worried in the slightest.

I dont rinse beforehand but do cook in a pot full of water and drain afterwards.