White Rice is Healthier than Brown Rice

All those people from the food co-op wearing Birkenstocks were wrong.

You've probably experienced it. You go out to a sushi restaurant with a bunch of friends and the chef comes over to take everyone's order. Then one member of your party, probably someone named "Willow" or something -- who invariably smells of pachouli and who braids and beads their armpit hair and is always waxing nostalgic over the Lilith Fair concerts -- asks that their spicy tuna cut roll be made with brown rice instead of white.

They says it nice enough, but you can detect a tiny bit of snobbery in their dietary request and you can sense that the chef briefly thinks about sprinkling a little poisonous Fugu into their cut roll, but he doesn't really do that kind of stuff -- at least not since he retired from the Yakuza. No doubt about it, Willow thinks the rest of you are nutritional cavemen, not fit to carry her recyclable Whole Foods canvas tote.

But Willow is wrong. There's nothing nutritionally wrong with white rice and it's in fact many ways better, health-wise, than brown, especially when you buy certain types and prepare it a certain way.

Before we get to types and preparation, though, let's dispose of this brown-rice superiority myth.

Brown Rice Vs. White Rice – Arsenic

Unfortunately, rice tends to absorb arsenic more readily than other plants. But here's where we need to make a distinction. There are two types of arsenic: organic and inorganic. Be aware, though, that in this case, "organic" doesn't mean it was raised on a farm without chemicals and allowed to run free with the wind blowing through its chemical tresses. Instead, it refers to molecules that have a framework of carbon atoms.

Organic arsenic is also harmless. Inorganic arsenic, on the other hand, doesn't contain carbon, but it is highly toxic. The latter is the kind we routinely dump into the environment via pesticides and poultry fertilizer, and regular exposure to it can cause bladder, lung, and skin cancer. It's also the kind that rice sops up while it's growing in flooded fields.

Back in 2012, Consumer Reports tested a great number of rice and rice-containing products for inorganic arsenic. All types of rice (except sushi and quick cooking) from Arkansas, Louisiana, or Texas had the highest levels of inorganic arsenic, while rice from California had 38% less inorganic arsenic than rice from other parts of the country.

Similarly, white basmati rice from India and Pakistan had less than half the inorganic arsenic of most other types.

But here's where brown rice gets a trouncing: The researchers found that brown rice had 80% more inorganic arsenic on average than white rice of the same type.

It's still smart to take some precautions regarding arsenic, though, regardless of which type you're preparing. At the very least, rinse every cup of rice with about 6 cups of water before you prepare it.

If you really want to be smart about it, though, "parboil" your rice. This method involves the following steps:

1. Put 4 cups of water in a pot for every cup of raw rice you're preparing and bring it to a boil.

2. Add the rice and boil for 5 minutes.

3. Chuck the arsenic-laden water.

4. Add fresh water (2 cups for every cup of raw rice).

5. Cook the rice under medium heat with a lid until all the water is absorbed.

This method will remove about 73 percent of the inorganic arsenic in the rice (Menon, et al., 2020) while retaining most its minerals.

What the judges say: White rice wins this round decisively.

Brown Rice Vs. White Rice – Glycemic Index

Brown rice is absorbed much more slowly (because of the fiber) and as such, doesn't cause as much of an insulin release. A recently released study out of the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston documented 10,507 cases of type 2 diabetes and concluded that people who ate a lot of white rice (5 servings a week) had a 17% higher risk of getting the disease than those who only ate it once a week.

Maybe, but I'd love to see how these women ate their rice. The thing is, hardly anybody eats white rice by itself… unless maybe they're on the Bataan Death March and it's all they've been given by their cruel captors. Instead, they eat their rice with meat, vegetables, and oils or fats that slow the digestion rate of the rice and thus lead to smaller and more sustained releases of insulin.

Regardless, here’s how you can reduce the glycemic index of white rice by making it more "resistant" (slower to digest).