Are you among the millions who just love eating rice in different combinations but worry about your weight?
In fact, one cup of cooked rice contains around 240 starchy calories that can be quickly converted into fat if they’re not burnt off.
But researchers in Sri Lanka have discovered a 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 have to do is cook the rice with coconut oil and then refrigerate it for 12 hours. This will reduce the calorie content by more than 50% when you eat it.
Doctors have previously warned that reheating rice can cause food poisoning so you need to watch out it’s not steaming hot when you eat it the next day. Also, make sure you don’t leave it in the fridge more than one day before you reheat it.
This statement was confirmed by an experiment conducted by Sri Lankan researchers which tested 38 kinds of rice. They concluded that preparing rice with coconut oil increases the amount of resistant starch in the rice, which is indigestible for us humans. This means that the resistant starch cannot be absorbed and transformed into energy or fat, so it contains no calories. The same scientists discovered that this method of cooking rice increases the amount of resistant starch 10 times.
How did they prepare it?
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.
Than they left it to simmer for 40 minutes or boil intensely for 20-25 minutes. When it was done they put it in the fridge for 12 hours to cool off.
Starch can be digestible or indigestible and rice is made of both types. Unlike the digestible starch, resistant starch cannot be broken down in the intestines where carbs are usually metabolized into simple sugars and absorbed into the blood stream. Consequently, if they could transform digestible starch into resistant starch it will lower the calories count in rice.
All of this happens because coconut oil gets into the starch granules in the cooking process and changes its composition, transforming it in resistant starch granules. This ultimately means that fewer calories get absorbed into our body. We need to stress that refrigerating the rice for 12 hours is essential in the process, but reheating the rice when you eat it doesn’t affect its composition in any way.
This research and its amazing discoveries were presented at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society, where they stressed out that further research is needed with human subjects to determine which rice varieties are best suited for this innovative calorie reduction process. They will also check to see if some other oils have a similar effect.
