Rice fuels diabetes and climate crises
economist.comLocked article, doesn't explain why in the ingress.
I think that there is a lot of issues with modern agriculture, but that people is eating rice is most likely not one of them. Just travel to Japan, they are more fit and it's rare to see overweight people.
In my country of birth Sweden, about 50% of the adult population is overweight and an alarming amount of them is obese. I don't think eating rice is the problem tbh. It's really alarming how bad journalism has become.
Extra ordinary claims require extra ordinary evidence.
The Japanese just eat less calories. There isn't anything particularly fancy about it, it's just less overall, be it rice, donuts, or fluffy Hokkaido milk bread.
> The answer is not a simple yes or no. While there are many factors that influence individual diets, the overall Japanese diet is generally lower in calories than that seen in some Western countries. On average, Japanese adults consume 2,150-2,900 calories per day, while the average American adult consumes 2,742-3,657 calories every day.[1]
Assuming the middles of those ranges that's like 500-1000 calories less than your average American. This does not mean they're more "fit" either, though things like pull-ups and 5K runs are easier when you're skinny vs. 50lbs overweight due to excess adipose tissue.
[1] https://www.thedonutwhole.com/do-japanese-eat-less-calories/....
The Japanese are also shorter and smaller than Westerners, on average. Of course they'd eat less calories. Many women I've talked to can't even find clothes in their size in America; they have to get clothes in children's sizes.
The big difference I see is that Japanese walk a LOT more than Americans, at least in the cities (which is where the large majority of Japanese live).
Yes I think that is obvious. But I also think the main reason is why the eat less calories is because they have a healtier culture where eating less calories is simply easier.
If I drive my car to the city where my parents live, the only real options I have on the way are fast foods that are very unhealthy.
If I go to the store, we have sections of candy and sodas but buying an ice tea is hard.
If I go out for dinner most options are unhealthy etc etc.
Our culture is eating bread and other wheat products that are filled with calories and also have an agriculture that uses pesticides like 5-10 times a year.
One issue is methane emissions from the rice paddies, which is a rice-specific phenomenon which you wouldn't have growing wheat, millet etc.
another rice-specific issue is the huge amount of arsenic. curiously, there's more arsenic in highly processed rice products (rice crackers), I have no idea why.
Sure, I only buy rice grown in italy due to that they have a much lesser amount of arsenic in the ground.
Italian rice also doesn't have the methane problem.
Pesticide runoff? Arsenic is commonly used a pesticide. Best of all, it's considered organic, so farmers are encouraged to use it.
Both naturally from rocks and soil, and latent arsenic from decades of arsenic pesticide use. Arsenic pesticides have been banned for a while, but they’re still in the soil.
Rice, for whatever reason, can take up this element more readily than other crops. There has been some research on this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29749629/
what confuses me is not the origin of the arsenic in rice, but why there's more after you process the rice... where does it come from??
Depends on your definition of "process", but parboiled rice can use the same arsenic contaminated groundwater and can raise the arsenic content depending on the process used, whereas mechanical hulling reduces it.
I think we should stop focusing on how much waste FOOD that humans live on produces and focus more on renewable energy.
I can see good intentions turning into famine very quickly.
This should answers your questions better I hope : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsuZGHfSa34
Seems like a lot of the issues reside in the heavy use of pesticides and I totally agree here, it's bad and scary. I don't like it and is one of the reasons why I'm beginning to grow as much food as possible myself.
This is a problem with agriculture and not rice specifically. I would say it's bad and fake news to say that a crop is bad due to bad practices used when growing it. We could ban it for example and produce less food but don't die of scary diseases that pesticides most likely creates. We could do a lot of things that would make food production a bit harder but healthier for us and the environment.
Altough it's easier to say that "rice sucks" or "red meat sucks" we shouldn't because it's untrue and I think it is misinformation and that is a big part of the reason I dislike modern journalism. It is lazy and focuses on the symptoms instead of the root cause. Modern media has convinced most people that eating soy beans badly produced and processed in china is better than eating cow meat from a local small farm that does everything right.
People always argue like there is no changing how we produce the foods and it annoys the hell out of me.
I'm completely unaware of the health of Japanese people, but fitness is not only a visual appearance. Plenty of people who are diabetic with terrible cholesterol that are skinny-fat.
Even so, being overweight is unhealthy and if you go into a store in Japan it's hard(er) to find unhealthy foods. In Sweden, the amount of candy that is available is almost scary and because I'm used to it, it wasn't until I visited other countries like Japan that this became clear to me how bad it is for me and society in large. It is really, really hard to avoid buying unhealthy foods when so many of the options are unhealthy. You have to read all packages very intimiately in order to know.
Swedes usually eat sandwiches in the morning while many Japanese people eat rice and fish. There were no almost no bread available in the stores when I visited and I think that is also telling. When I went to the cinema in Japan, it was only us foreigners that bought candy (which there were very little of and very expensive). I saw no one else buy anything, they just went in and enjoyed the movie. When eating out, there were a lot of choices of good quality restaurants and even the fast food seems quite healthy or at least have options that isn't dripping with fat and sugars like the alternatives in the west.
Another example is ice tea. It's very popular in Japan it seemed like. It existed everywhere in shops and vending machines. Here it's almost impossible to buy. You can buy hundreds of different kinds of expensive sugar water but ice tea is hard to find in the general store.
If rice is so bad that the article claims, japanese people should be extremely unhealthy but in reality it seems it's the complete reverse at least from my personal experience. I don't know the health status of Japanese people in general and a lot of them smoke but they still at least seem more healthy than Swedes on a society level.
Okinawa, which I visited, has a lot of old people and is one of the "blue zones" of the world were a lot of people live to be 100 years old or older.
I'm just saying that I don't believe what the article claims since my experience that I have seen with my own eyes tells me a different story. The article seems extremely likely to be click-bait and possible just false information. I'm expecting to at least get some notion of what the claims are by reading the ingress and I'm not going to pay for reading what I assume is going to be clickbait.
I just think this is common practice by "journalists" today and I think it's depressing.
>Swedes usually eat sandwiches in the morning while many Japanese people eat rice and fish. There were no almost no bread available in the stores when I visited and I think that is also telling.
What century did you last visit Japan? Bread is very, very common here. A typical "Japanese" breakfast these days at a cafe is toast and coffee, and every grocery store has bread easily available for 100-300 yen (depending on quality). Bread is typically sliced thicker here though, and you can buy the bread with different slice thickness. Bakeries are also common, with many European-style breads and pastries.
A more traditional Japanese breakfast might be natto (fermented beans), rice, and raw egg with a little fish, but toast and coffee are extremely common and popular these days.
>I don't know the health status of Japanese people in general and a lot of them smoke but they still at least seem more healthy than Swedes on a society level.
Smoking is going down lately; with the 2020 Olympics, they passed new laws restricting indoor smoking, so people are quitting. It's gotten really hard to find restaurants that allow smoking inside.
But yes, overall, Japanese still eat a lot of rice, and are much thinner on average than Americans (I don't know about Swedes). The idea that rice eaters are all diabetic is utterly ridiculous and defies reality; any "journalist" who writes this obviously has never been to Asia.
> "Consequently, rice production is responsible for 12% of total methane emissions—and 1.5% of total greenhouse-gas emissions, comparable to the aviation sector. Vietnam’s paddy fields produce much more carbon equivalent than the country’s transportation."
I think there is a difference between flying around a few million people who are part of the 1% and feeding 60% of the world's population. I think looking at sources of emissions is fine, especially when there is potential for reduction. But this feels a bit like blaming the global poor for climate change. Rice does not fuel the climate crisis, coal power plants do.
Half the population of industrial nations may fly in a given year, and it works out to about 11% of the world population flying. However the "1%" may account for up to half of aviation's emissions, mostly on private jets.
https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/one-percent-worlds-...
Those do sound like plausible numbers. Appreciate the data!
Food for thought: with minimal processing, rice can be turned into a consumer-ready foodstuff that keeps for years without refridgeration. The plant itself produces a greater yield per acre than other grains and, when dried, packs an incredible 350 calories per 100 grams.
This is all to say that rice demands less farmland development, is more fuel efficient to farm, more fuel efficient to process, more fuel efficient to transport/store, and less prone to wastage. I'm not a climate scientist, but I suspect these factors balance out the calculus somewhat.
Perhaps more importantly: rice is cheap, delicious, and culturally important. It's simply not going away as long as people continue to live on this planet. That's not to say that we should consider the methane footprint to be an empty trifle, of course. It's absolutely still a problem to be solved.
One possible solution would the GMO route -- China is uniquely positioned here, since they have both the required research infrastructure and economic command to make it happen and get adopted. The promise of this is already starting to be realized with China's recent success in making truly perennial rice a commercial reality[1][2]
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00997-3
[2]: By the way, I'm not a China plant and I'll prove it: Taiwan deserves international recognition as a free and independent country. China needs to stop perpetrating the Uyghur genocide. China needs to free Tibet and cease their domination of Tibetan Buddhism. China needs to rescind the national security law and restore democracy to Hong Kong.
It's sad that if you say anything even remotely positive about China on HN, you must clarify you are not a CCP plant. I understand why you do it though: I was recently accused of being an Iranian plant!
I love rice in all its forms. Thanks for your comment.
> "I love rice in all its forms."
Now this is going to far. There is clearly better and worse rice. Last thing we need in this forum is some basmati rice apologist :D
Haha, I adore basmati rice! Truly. Don't you like it?
I did exaggerate though: I don't like brown rice much... I can eat it, I just don't love it.
Damn, I was going to raise brown rice and black rice as the pinnacle of food. Acquired taste though, for sure.
I agree with your conclusion but come on, before the pandemic there were 4.5 billions air passenger per years, so airlines are globally flying way more than the 1%.
"4.5 billion" -- that's not individual passengers, that counts the guy commuting between New York and Los Angeles twice a week 100 times, and Elon Musk probably 250 times, idk. (Realistically does not count private jets probably.)
Sensationalist garbage. The vast majority of the article is about stagnating yields and global over-reliance on rice, with two small, uncited, unsupported blurbs in support of the title:
> No mere victim of global warming, rice cultivation is also a major cause of it, because paddy fields emit a lot of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
No data to support, no link to relevant studies, not even a real measurement of emitted methane.
EDIT: Okay, there is one additional blurb on the subject, completely detached from the above. Not a lot of cohesion in this piece.
> Consequently, rice production is responsible for 12% of total methane emissions—and 1.5% of total greenhouse-gas emissions, comparable to the aviation sector. Vietnam’s paddy fields produce much more carbon equivalent than the country’s transportation.
This seems bad faith to me. Like they needed a data point to support their title and found the most fantastical-sounding one they could think of. But yeah, feeding the majority of the global population is going to leave a footprint. This only makes sense to evaluate in comparison to alternatives, and I think you'd be absolutely hard-pressed to come up with an alternative with fewer ecological consequences.
> Rice’s nutritional quality is another growing concern. The grain is high in glucose, which contributes to diabetes and obesity, and low in iron and zinc, two important micronutrients. In South Asia the prevalence of diabetes and malnutrition can be traced to over-reliance on rice.
Absolutely no support for the latter statement.
The title here is pure clickbait and does not belong here.
It's unfortunate that sources are not specified, but the methane emissions from rice paddies are well known, I believe. I didn't find absolute numbers, but OWID does list them as significant (though less than from animal): https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#annual-ch4-em...
I did not hear about the rice-diabetes connection before, but "golden rice" was developed specifically to deal with the nutritional deficiencies caused by rice (over)consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
Yeah, I noticed the lack for support for any of the assertions.
I don't know if they are right or wrong, I'm just saying the article merely forcefully makes assertions without backing them up.
The Japanese wants to have a word with you. Yes they have a high mortality rate in stomach cancer due to all the preserved and salty food but rice is probably not very harmful in the grand picture.
Meanwhile North America with its family size portion of everything...
No developed Asian country needs a lecture on health and longevity best practices from any Anglosphere country.
Are you sure about that? This 2019 article claims that Asian Americans (in several states) live longer than the Japanese (in Japan).
https://180degreehealth.com/blue-zones-bullshit/
(though I haven't checked the statistics myself)
1. I bet Japanese in several prefectures of Japan outlive the general population of Japanese as well.
2. Populations with a lot of immigrants tend to have strange health and longevity statistics. See for example the Hispanic Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_paradox
That can be the people with Asian roots bringing their eating traditions with them immigrating in the US. Like mostly cooking by themselves instead of eating out. Or frequency of snacking. Or having a different palate/diet than Anglos and other ethnicities.
He has interesting ideas but then presents his alternate views, without a rigorous scientific approach, as settled. Worth investigating though.
Except for all the insane industrial and otherwise pollution, but sure.
100%. The Western media loves to lecture other people. The lectures are becoming more irrelevant with the rise of the East.
Can't read the article because it's pay walled but I very much doubt rice is anywhere close to the top 10 food that cause diabetes
The only thing I could find is this article that cites a study that's says eating 450gr+ of rice per day regularly can increase your risk of diabetes, which seems like a crazy diet for most of the world
> The only thing I could find is this article that cites a study that's says eating 450gr+ of rice per day regularly can increase your risk of diabetes, which seems like a crazy diet for most of the world.
Is that cooked or uncooked?
The rice I buy is 150 calories for 42g uncooked, so 450g uncooked would be 1600 calories. That does sound high for most places.
But that same rice cooked is 200 calories for 150g, so 450g cooked would be 600 calories. That seems quite reasonable.
Like, IF one is already glucose intolerant then they should be mindful about white rice, as it has a moderate glycemic index. Don't eat very large portions, don't eat all the time, mix with high fiber vegetables, etc... and you will be fine.
But then, I agree saying rice is fueling diabetes is a complete joke.
Rice won't cause you to have diabetes unless you're fat generally speaking or unless you already have diabetes type 1.. the most common type of diabetes is really diabetes 2.. you get diabetes 2 when you are obese and at the same time you eat high glycemic index foods.. As far as what kind of foods will cause you to become obese, rice is probably not on the top of the list because it's a low energy density food... Problem is once you become obese and and you thereby get insulin resistance, if you eat rice then your blood sugar will go up and that's called diabetes..
So the problem is eating rice if you're fat, but if you're skinny eating rice is not going to make you fat not generally unless you eat a lot because rice is a low energy density food relatively speaking
I know more than a few people with type 2 diabetes, none were obese. Sometimes it just happens
But typically only when they were elderly
At the rate we're going, is it OK for me to eat anything now?
Yes, you can eat ze bugs
This one paragraph is the sum total given for the diabetes angle:
"Rice’s nutritional quality is another growing concern. The grain is high in glucose, which contributes to diabetes and obesity, and low in iron and zinc, two important micronutrients. In South Asia the prevalence of diabetes and malnutrition can be traced to over-reliance on rice."
Can it be traced though? I see no source on that. Please for the love of people make claims with actual evidence.
People in Asia used to eat more rice especially as a proportion of diet in the past...
Could replace that almost 1:1 with wheat and it wouldn't be more or less correct.
Rice is probably the worst junk food in the world, with a GI of 90 and billion of people eating it, its negative impact on health on a global scale is just shockingly bad. I stopped eating that junk food a few years ago, couldn't feel better when I have other low GI high fiber carbs on every meal.
Saw some comments on the east vs west nonsense, this thread is about rice, although it is mainly eaten in the east, it is damage is on a global scale. We are talking about a food that has a GI of 90, one of highest in the world. It doesn't matter whether your skin color is white, yellow, blue or pink, keep eating junk food that has GI of 90 is going to cause you diabetes.
can you provide some source? Harvard says it's 73 ± 4 For comparison Potato: 78 ± 4, White bread: 75 ± 2 https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glyce...
Wow, I was really surprised by rice's GI, thanks, I erroneously thought it was lower than white pasta.
Most of the article is about how growing rice contributes negatively to climate change, and also how it's not scaling up with demand and the yields are getting lower while demand increases.
However, they also make this claim:
> Rice’s nutritional quality is another growing concern. The grain is high in glucose, which contributes to diabetes and obesity, and low in iron and zinc, two important micronutrients. In South Asia the prevalence of diabetes and malnutrition can be traced to over-reliance on rice.
Is this true? Is South Asia's prevalence of diabetes notorious enough, and can it be traced to rice consumption? The article provides no references.
In theory if you’d eat carbs all day long since you wake up till you fall asleep and keep the high level of glucose non stop you could develop insulin resistance in the cells which would lead to diabetes type 2
So this title is kinda of a joke…
Where is the lab-grown rice?
It seems possible in principle to use cell/tissue culture to grow only the rice (or wheat or other grass seeds) grains, rather than the whole plant.
In that case just a few mega factories could feed the world.
Paywall, so it's possible the article addresses this, but from my understanding, it is rice cultivated in deep water paddies that contributes to excess methane emissions, as it creates the conditions for methane-producing anaerobic bacteria. Cultivating rice in shallow water that results in less methane emission is not only possible, but possibly optimal.
let me guess, “eat insects”?
I think potatoes is what the Chinese government was already promoting for some years.
China does promote potatoes. But the key advantage of the potato is that it grows where rice will not, in the drier and colder west of China. So it allows China to expand its food growing capacity.
Unfortunately, while I had plenty of good experiences with food available in China, it was my experience (2018) that the restaurants just didn't know what to do with potatoes; they were usually served like a turnip or carrot or something, and not treated as a starch. It probably doesn't help that most of the potato dishes that Westerners adore involve dairy products or olive oil in some way, when these are not so accessible in China.
Are potatoes healthy, anyway? I adore them, but they cause trouble (gas, fermentation) and they seem to be excluded from many kinds of health diets.
(The again, most nutritionists seem cargo cultists to me)
I've always been told to not eat the rice if it has eyes but perhaps those who told me were climate change deniers
can't read the article, but does rice include brown rice? that would be surprising
Brown rice might not cause diabetes (if other rice does at all), but the methane from production will be the same.
Global rice shortage imminent, anti-rice article on cue. Rice the new smoking.
Exactly. Though if you go a bit deeper, it's more about a fertilizer shortage that will impact many other crops as well.
Which is probably itself a consequence of the fact energy is getting more expensive at a global scale since you need a decent amount to make fertilizers. You have to dig deeper/further for increasingly lower returns nowadays. Let's hope that enough of that energy is actually spent on energy transitioning or we're going to have big problems. (Ha, my bad, we're actually having big problems, right now)
Kinda, but it's also because China closed the fertilizer exports, and Russia invaded Ukraine and the west is actively boycotting russian fertilizer exports.
Is there actually a climate crisis? Because I’ve been told that “the end is near” for over 20 years now, and it’s like the “disaster” is just around the corner.
It feels like the “crisis” is manufactured by people making money and gaining power because the end is perpetually nigh. How long is this crisis supposed to last? It seems like it’s nothing more than a totalitarian cudgel used to achieve the economic restructuring dreams of post-Soviet Marxists.
Now an article claiming rice is “bad?” A staple food for most of the world’s population. If they can convince most of the world to abandon rice, that is the foot in the door for convincing anyone anything.
We should stop actual pollution and stop with the carbon dioxide hysteria. Stopping CO2 isn’t cleaning waterways or building toilets, or eliminating toxic chemicals in the food chain. But there’s not power to be gained by fighting plebeian pollution like there is with a literal re-ordering of the energy industry and economy.
No, there is no climate "crisis". What there is is a changing climate which may - or may not, the models which are used to gauge what is going to happen are notoriously inaccurate - cause problems in certain regions of the world due to increasing drought or - in other regions - increased precipitation. Depending on where the climate will go in the coming centuries - and that is the time frame you have to think about, not the '10 years to extinction' which is often bandied around by climate alarmists - there is a possibility of sea level rise causing problems in lower-lying regions like Bangladesh and the Netherlands. Most of the problems which are likely to occur can be solved using technological means ranging from building or raising dikes (like the Netherlands has been doing for centuries), moving to more water-efficient methods of agriculture, building desalination plants to increase the amount of water available for agriculture, building storage reservoirs to collect runoff in the cold months for use in the warm months and more.
The climate "crisis" is a political stick which is being used by various groups for their own means, some of them ideological - e.g. the economic restructuring you mentioned, viz. "green new deal" - and some of them more basic ploys to gain power. Yet others are simply attempts at using the climate scare to make money.
Yes, it would be far better to concentrate on reducing actual pollution instead of chasing the CO₂ boogeyman but the movers and shakers behind the climate scare seem to have decided there is more power to be gained from whipping up the populace with tales of flooded cities and parched fields than can be achieved with the prospect of dead oceans and silent springs - probably because that has been tried before and did not manage to scare the populace into compliance with their policy schemes. While exaggerated - just like the climate scare - there is more truth to the claims of pollution being a threat to future generations than CO₂ being so. The planet has become "greener" due to the increased CO₂ level, forest cover has increased [1], agricultural yield has increased while evapotranspiration has decreased leading to higher water efficiency [2]. But... who cares when whipping up the populace gives you clicks, votes, money and power.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/tree-cover...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/037837...