There are 204 calories in a cup of cooked white rice, but a new cooking technique developed by Sri Lankan scientists was able to cut it in half. Soon, you won’t have to feel guilty for having that extra rice or use the technique to lose weight without going on a no-rice diet.
Researchers at the College of Chemical Sciences, Colombo, Western, Sri Lanka wanted to find a way to help curb obesity in areas where rice is a staple. They know that rice contains starch and that starch is the source of the calories, so they developed a new technique of cooking rice that can reduce the calories.
Resistant starch (RS) in the rice was the target in the study because the small intestine can't break it down. As a result, starch is absorbed by the body, which translates to lower calorie intake. The researchers experimented with 38 kinds of rice with the objective of increasing the RS.
The new cooking method added a teaspoon of coconut oil to boiling water for every half cup of rice. The team simmered the rice for 40 minutes and refrigerated it for 12 hours. This technique successfully increased the RS by 10 times, compared to the traditionally cooked rice, by converting the digestible starch to RS.
"Because obesity is a growing health problem, especially in many developing countries, we wanted to find food-based solutions," Sudhair A. James, study leader from the College of Chemical Sciences, Colombo, Western, Sri Lanka, said in a press release.
"We discovered that increasing rice resistant starch (RS) concentrations was a novel way to approach the problem. If the best rice variety is processed, it might reduce the calories by about 50-60 percent."
Not everyone would love to eat cold rice, but the good news is that even if you reheat the rice, the RS will not revert back to its original form.
The study was presented at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) held in Denver, Colo.
