Rice and spinach are staples for babies' and young children's diets, but toxic metals and metalloids found in those foods can cause severe health impacts.
University of DelawareSep 6 2024 Rice and spinach are staples for babies' and young children's diets, but toxic metals and metalloids found in those foods can cause severe health impacts.
Flooding rice fields Crops such as corn, soybeans, and wheat are grown in soils that are not very wet. So farmers water them to make sure the plants get the nutrients they need to grow, but never enough to fully flood them. Seyfferth said that once the arsenic is in the water, it can easily be absorbed by the rice roots and transported into the grain.
"But, even under those drier conditions when there was more cadmium, the concentrations of cadmium in the grain were not of concern for human health," Seyfferth said. Drying the soil out introduced oxygen into the soil pores, Seyfferth said, which slowed down the microorganisms that dissolve iron oxides and create methane and changed the chemistry.
Related StoriesThrough a U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture research grant, the researchers are studying arsenic in rice through some field work in Arkansas. They'll work directly with farmers to develop tools to help them manage water flooding their rice paddies.
"It's really important to get stakeholder feedback to see what's feasible for farmers," Seyfferth said, "and that it wouldn't be a big burden to something that they already do, or changing a practice that they're doing, that they have to do to meet some other standard, like a different food safety standard."
"We might be making the cadmium problem worse by using chlorinated irrigation water for leafy greens," Seyfferth said. "Maybe we should think about alternative ways to disinfect irrigation water that doesn't involve chloride."
Food Agriculture Arsenic Brain Breathing Children Minerals Nutrients Oxygen Research Soybeans Toxins Wheat
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