Scientists discover a simple way to cook rice that could halve the calories - ScienceAlert

Scientists discover a simple way to cook rice that could halve the calories - ScienceAlert

But now researchers in Sri Lanka have discovered a new, simple way of cooking the grain that dramatically cuts its calories by as much as 50 percent, and also offers some other important health benefits. And we're never going to cook rice any other way again.

All you need to do is get a pot of water boiling, but before adding your raw rice, you add coconut oil - about 3 percent of the weight of the rice you're going to add. So that's roughly a teaspoon for half a cup of rice, explains Sudhair James, an undergraduate chemistry student from the College of Chemical Sciences in Sri Lanka, who led the research with his supervisor. He presented the work at theNational Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society on Monday.

"After it was ready, we let it cool in the refrigerator for about 12 hours. That's it,"James told Roberto A. Ferdman from The Washington Post. To eat it, you simply pop it in the microwave and, voila, you have a "fluffy white rice" that's significantly better for you.

Simple, right? But the process actually involves some pretty fascinating food chemistry. At the heart of the technique is the fact that not all starches are created equal.

There are two main types - digestible starches, which our bodies quickly turn into glucose and store as fat if we don't burn it up; and resistant starches, which aren't broken down into glucose in the stomach, so they have a lower calorie content. They instead pass through to the large intestine, where they act more like a dietary fibre and can provide all kinds of useful gut benefits.

... he oil works by interacting with the starch molecules and changing its architecture. "Cooling for 12 hours will lead to formation of hydrogen bonds between the amylose molecules outside the rice grains which also turns it into a resistant starch," explained James in a press release. And he notes that heating the rice back up afterwards doesn't change the resistant starch levels.