Obesity may not be your biggest issue if you are eating rice as a staple part of your diet:

I was busy writing a reply to this steemit post https://steemit.com/health/@mgibson/does-rice-increase-your-weight by @mgibson, but it got a bit too long and involved.  So, rather than dumping it in his replies, I turned it into a post.

Beyond the glycemic index issues around weight gain with rice I want to let people know there are toxicity issues and how to avoid them and still eat rice.
I read that we sometimes will make fat cells to lock away toxic substances and that it is very difficult to get your body to liberate fat before detoxing those substances as your body will hold on to that fat to keep the toxins locked away.  Maybe the detoxifying action of drinking lots of water is behind the recommendation to drink to encourage fat loss, but I suspect there will be other more complex metabolic processes involved also. 

I notice a pattern in my daily practice as a homeopath treating autistic children: very high rates of arsenic in their hair tests when they come from an ethnic group from the Indian subcontinent.  This is the case even when they were born and live in the UK and the USA.  
I asked my husband about this because he has worked on studying arsenic in water sources on the Indian subcontinent.  Was it in well water?  Was it transferred down from mother to child because I was seeing high levels of arsenic in children who were born in the USA who hadn't drunk arsenic contaminated water?
He said it is likely to be from a diet rich in rice grown in arsenic rich soils and directed me to this article


credit: The Independent. 

Recommendations for avoiding arsenic from rice consumption:

Sourcing rice from regions with lower grain inorganic arsenic concentrations – for example, basmati rice is two to three-fold lower in inorganic arsenic than rice from the European Union or from the US. Cooking rice in a large excess of water also helps to remove inorganic arsenic. link.