Soaking uncooked rice for several hours before cooking, cooking like pasta (using a ratio of at least 6 cups water to 1 cup rice), and draining excess water afterward, can remove about 30% of inorganic arsenic. Here’s my picture post on how to cook rice with lots of water like pasta.

New study. Same findings as previous studies: Take out the animal food, improve health:

Effect Of A Brown Rice Based Vegan Diet And Conventional Diabetic Diet On Glycemic Control Of Patients With Type 2 Diabetes: A 12-week Randomized Clinical Trial, PLOS ONE, 2 June 2016

Several intervention studies have suggested that vegetarian or vegan diets have clinical benefits, particularly in terms of glycemic control, in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D); however, no randomized controlled trial has been conducted in Asians who more commonly depend on plant-based foods, as compared to Western populations. Here, we aimed to compare the effect of a vegan diet and conventional diabetic diet on glycemic control among Korean individuals.

Participants diagnosed with T2D were randomly assigned to follow either a vegan diet (excluding animal-based food including fish; n = 46) or a conventional diet recommended by the Korean Diabetes Association 2011 (n = 47) for 12 weeks.

Conclusion: Both diets led to reductions in HbA1c levels; however, glycemic control was better with the vegan diet than with the conventional diet.

Participants filled out daily dietary records for the whole 12 weeks to measure compliance. The vegan diet group had no restrictions on calorie intake, conventional group did.

Not only did those in the vegan group (who were eating more carbs) lower their HbA1c and fasting blood glucose but they lost more weight and reduced their waist circumference compared to the conventional group. (The researchers adjusted for these and still found a benefit for the vegan diet. It wasn’t just that they lost weight.) These results are not unlike what Barnard found in 2006 when he compared a vegan diet to the American Diabetes Association’s recommended diet.

Let me draw your attention to this:

In addition, both epidemiological and experimental evidence has suggested that the chronic exposure to chemicals such as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) may disturb glucose and lipid metabolism [8]. As fatty animal foods, including fish, are the main sources of exposure to POPs [9], the use of a vegan diet that excludes any animal foods could also be beneficial in terms of avoiding POP exposure.

They said it at the end too, when they talked about mechanisms:

Another explanation may involve the reduced exposure to POPs by vegan diets through the prohibition of animal food. Recently, background exposure to low-dose POPs has been found to be an important risk factor of developing T2D [8]. Furthermore, these chemicals are associated with poor glycemic control among T2D patients [24], and with an increased risk of cardiovascular diseases [25, 26], which are the most common complications of T2D. Hence, avoiding animal food contaminated with POPs may offer additional benefit for T2D patients.

I’ve been saying for years now … it probably isn’t just the animal fat but also the industrial chemicals that are dissolved in the animal fat that are fueling obesity and diabetes epidemics.