New Way Of Cooking Rice Cuts Calories By 50%

An undergraduate student and a professor at the University of Sri Lanka has discovered an alternate way of cooking rice that cuts its calories by half. The method involves boiling first the water then adding the raw rice and 3 percent of coconut oil of the weight of the rice being cooked.

Sudhair James, the undergraduate student, presented the findings of his preliminary research at the National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society on Monday, Washington Post reports. James adds that after cooking the rice, it is refrigerated for 12 hours.

Rice is a digestible starch that takes only a little time to digest but quickly turns into glucose and then glycogen. The excess glycogen, unless burned, cause weight gain. Resistant starches take longer to process but are not converted into glucose of glycogen.

By modifying the way some food, like rice, is prepared, it could change the type of starches, researches indicate. For instance, a greater proportion of fried rice and pilaf style rice become resistant starch.

By reducing the digestible starch in steamed rice, the calorie are cut, said Dr Pushparajah Thavarajva, James’s professor who supervised the research. The two tested eight recipes on 38 kinds of rice available in Sri Lanka.

By adding the lipid, the coconut oil, ahead of cooking the rice and then cooling it after cooking, it dramatically changes the composition of the starch in the staple food of Asians.

James explains, “The oil interacts with the starch in rice and changes its architecture … Chilling the rice then helps foster the conversion of starches. The result is a healthier serving, even when you heat it back up.”

Adding coconut oil, which has a lot of calories, to rice would not make the rice more fattening because the change in starch type cancels out calories that the coconut oil adds, reports Yahoo News.

To contact the writer, email: v.hernandez@ibtimes.com.au