Speaker 2
So that is kind of what i researched, at least when it comes to arsenic. I tried to look into arsenic in rice, because i don't know about you, aaron, but when i think of arsenic poisoning, i think of rice, yes. And i actually didn't even know why in my brain i had that association a but arsenic is something, it is ubiquitous. But one of the reasons that it can be found in relatively high levels in rice and in things like rice cereal, which for a while was touted as like the best thing to feed your baby, rice cereal, it's because of the way that rice is grown and harvested. So it's not necessarily rice specific, but it's the way that rice is grown, which is often under flood irrigation. And so in places where you want to be able to grow rice during the dry season, where you don't have as much rainfall, if ound water is used for that flooding, ground water can contain a lot of arsenic. And on top of that, the way that rice grows in this flood irrigation happens to be really good conditions for arsenic to be in that form of arsenate, the reduced form, which is very toxic and bio available. And so it's easily taken up in the rice and accumulates in the rice in high levels. And then when you dry that rice out, pulverize it and concentrate it into something like a baby cereal, where you're exposed to a lot more rice than you would be if you were just eating a bowl of rice, then it's even more concentrated. And so that's how you end up with high levels of arsenic, potentially, in something like rice or a rice cereal.