Comparison of a Chemical and Enzymatic Extraction of Arsenic from Rice and an Assessment of the Arsenic Absorption from Contaminated Water by Cooked Rice

Rice is a target food for arsenic speciation based analyses because of its relatively high arsenic concentration and per capita consumption rates. Improved speciation data for rice can be helpful in estimating inorganic arsenic exposures in the U.S. and in endemic populations. The inorganic arsenic exposure for cooked rice should include both the arsenic in raw rice plus the arsenic absorbed from the water used to prepare it. The amount of arsenic absorbed from water by rice during preparation was assessed using five different types of rice cooked in both contaminated drinking water and arsenic-free reagent water. The rice samples were extracted using trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) and speciated using IC−ICP-MS. The TFA procedure was able to extract 84−104% of the arsenic (As) from the five different cooked rice samples. Chromatographic recoveries ranged from 99% to 116%. The dimethylarsinic acid (DMA) and inorganic arsenic concentra tion ranged from 22 to 270 ng of As/g of rice and from 31 to 108 ng of As/g of rice, respectively, for samples cooked in reagent water. The overall recoveries, which relate the sum of the chromatographic species back to the total digested concentration, ranged from 89% to 117%. The absorption of arsenic by rice from the total volume of water [1:1 to 4:1 (water:rice)] used in cooking was between 89% and 105% for two different contaminated drinking water samples. A comparison of the TFA extraction to an enzymatic extraction was made using the five rice samples and NIST 1568a rice flour. The two extraction procedures produced good agreement for inorganic arsenic, DMA, and the overall recovery. Through the use of IC−ESI-MS/MS with a parent ion of m/z 153 and fragment ions of m/z 138, 123, and 105, the structure dimethylthioarsinic acid was tentatively identified in two of the rice samples using the enzymatic extraction.