I’ve always been a big promoter of brown rice, and I was happily testing recipes last week for short-, medium- and long-grain varieties when I remembered that there had been reports in the past year about dangerous arsenic levels in rice, particularly in brown rice. I thought about shelving the recipe tests and choosing another subject for this week’s Recipes for Health, but then I decided to take a closer look at the reports to see if there was a way to make rice viable for health-conscious rice lovers.

The study and report, both by Consumer Reports, are disturbing. It is clear that the levels of inorganic arsenic in rice and rice products are high, and that we and especially children, babies and pregnant women should limit our intake of rice and rice products such as cereals, rice cakes and rice beverages. Rice cereal for babies should not be the go-to baby food that it has been for years.

The better news is that the extensive testing by the Consumers Union of many brands of rice and rice products shows that some products are considerably lower in arsenic than others. White rice grown in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri and Texas, which together account for 76 percent of the rice grown in the United States, was considerably higher in arsenic than rice grown in California; this is probably linked to the fact that these states are also cotton-producing states that until recently permitted pesticides with high levels of arsenic to combat the boll weevil. I took some comfort in this, because among my favorite rice varieties are those grown by Lundberg Farms in California.

The Consumers Union is putting pressure on regulators to phase out the use of pesticides containing arsenic, to ban the use of arsenic-laden manure as fertilizer and to prohibit the feeding of arsenic-containing drugs and animal byproducts to animals. But meanwhile, what is a brown rice lover like me to do? Across the board, brown rice is higher in arsenic levels than white rice, because the residues tend to concentrate in the outer shell of the grain.