>…they added a teaspoon of coconut oil to boiling water. Then, they added a half a cup of rice. They simmered this for 40 minutes, but one could boil it for 20-25 minutes instead, the researchers note. Then, they refrigerated it for 12 hours. This procedure increased the RS by 10 times for traditional, non-fortified rice.
The team experimented with 38 kinds of rice from Sri Lanka,
developing a new way of cooking rice that increased the RS
content. In this method, they added a teaspoon of coconut
oil to boiling water. Then, they added a half a cup of rice.
They simmered this for 40 minutes, but one could boil it for
20-25 minutes instead, the researchers note. Then, they
refrigerated it for 12 hours. This procedure increased the
RS by 10 times for traditional, non-fortified rice.
How can such a simple change in cooking result in a lower-
calorie food? James explains that the oil enters the starch
granules during cooking, changing its architecture so that
it becomes resistant to the action of digestive enzymes.
This means that fewer calories ultimately get absorbed into
the body. “The cooling is essential because amylose, the
soluble part of the starch, leaves the granules during
gelatinization,” explains James. “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.” Reheating the rice for consumption, he
notes, does not affect the RS levels.
So the key ingredient is cooling for 12 hours. Simple, but not exactly in the sense a casual reader might infer from the title.
> "James explains that the oil enters the starch granules during cooking, changing its architecture so that it becomes resistant to the action of digestive enzymes"
> "The team also will check out whether other oils besides coconut have this effect."
"In conclusion, cooling of cooked white rice increased resistant starch content. Cooked white rice cooled for 24 hours at 4°C then reheated lowered glycemic response compared with freshly cooked white rice."
it's the cooling, I don't understand why this isn't explained.
Yep, cold rice tastes bad for the exact reason stated in the article: resistant starch. So common wisdom for storing cooked rice is to put it in the freezer as soon as possible to prevent digestible starch from turning into resistant starch. The transformation stops under freezing temperatures.
It's well researched and have even been popularized and mentioned in every major diet source for decades: potatoes boiled and cook-off increases the RS levels and decreases G.I. and insulin spikes majorly.
Shouldn't need a whole team to develop this for rice as a "new way" with huge effort. Just trying it and measuring the results would be enough.
Sure Mr. Snooty Scientist. Let me get my <checks Internet>: scale, test-tube or conductive container, a way to measure water, a way to hold and burn food, a way to measure temperature.
Well shit, I've got most of that at home. Fine Mr. Snarky Wizard, you win. You didn't have to be so mean about it.
Cool experiment. I grew up on that kind of material.
And as an aside, cold rice leads naturally to fried rice and cooking experiments there. Which is awesome.
Your body has certain nutritional expectations from eating food, and if you mess with it, your hunger will just go up. That's also why sugarless drinks don't help you - they only confuse your body even more and trick it into eating more.
The trick of not being obese is eating less.
One of options here is eating fewer times a day, but there's more than one option. Once you adjust you will have no problem eating less.
And the trick to eating less is to reduce appetite, and the trick to reducing appetite is to chew and swallow plenty of resistant starch (which you can’t eat but which your one-hundred-trillion-cell gut bacteria eat with bliss) so that your gut bacteria stop demanding “feed us” through your vagus nerve.
Heh, I figured this out quite by accident several years ago. I noticed that I tended to gain less weight when I cooled the rice in the fridge just after cooking it, instead of eating it straight from the pot. I couldn’t explain it.
It's kind of wierd that obesity is such a problem now in developing countries that something like this is a worthy research output. Some of my ancestors had to eat tree bark to avoid starvation. They'd be so confused by this
In the 90s the predominant fear of overpopulation used to be that we would run out of food. Now we know not that making food is easy, but we wreck the environment along the way.
Making specific monocrops with petroleum-based fertilizers is easy, but monocrops with petroleum-based fertilizers is not a sustainable practice if we would like to continue to live on Earth.
It's a common thought but from what I can tell it's probably not true. Natural gas is simply the cheapest and most scaled way of producing ammonia (which is the critical ingredient in fertilizer production). Apparently electrolysis could come within a factor of 2 in terms of price.
Also worth considering that passenger aviation is on the same order of magnitude in terms of CO2 emissions. Remarkable given everyone has to eat.
I was thinking of terms of how monocrops work: we kill everything that's living (that's more complicated than a single cell organism let's say) to plant one species, then use fertilizers to help it grow from soil that's being depleted of it's own nutrients, while also spraying it with pesticides to make sure nothing else eats it.
Seems that's not a great play, long-term.
>Also worth considering that passenger aviation is on the same order of magnitude in terms of CO2 emissions. Remarkable given everyone has to eat.
Interesting. Since I don't have to fly, I don't. (I don't drive, either).
Wait until someone discovers that some modern way of cooking or processing (microwave, etc) unlocks the full caloric potential of some basic foodstuff and that is a primary cause of obesity today.
Oh wait, I think we already know this about sugar.
The Resistant Starch 2 (RS2) in green bananas has served as my bowel-regulating medicine for decades now. TFA makes me wonder if rice prepared this way could have a similar effect. It's a nuisance to keep green bananas onhand for breakfast daily, and once they turn yellow the RS2 has become sugar and the medicinal value is gone. Rice however...
Fortunately it's not unusual for the grocery stores around me (CA) to put out bananas so green it requires a knife to peel them.
Those last about a week before turning too yellow just hanging from a hook in the kitchen.
When I visited family in IL last summer it proved quite difficult and I was often visiting multiple stores on shopping trips just to find bananas remotely green. My quality of life jumps off a cliff every time I visit, this is part of why. The produce availability sucks there in general compared to CA.
Never eaten a peel before... I just eat one in the morning. Never tried the flour, just know of its availability.
If I eat more than one in a day that's green it's so effective I'll end up constipated for a couple days. Never experimented with eating less than one, fortunately one seems to be the perfect unit of consumption for me, YMMV.
Wow, that's wild. I can't imagine a green banana causing anything remotely resembling discomfort.
If I'm particularly sick with the runs, the first thing I look for is a banana so green peeling requires a knife and tastes like eating chalk. It fixes me right up within the hour, and I've never had negative effects. But on the day to day it's not so green, just green enough to not be sweet.
BTW this isn't some trail I'm blazing here. Green bananas are well known as a dietary source of RS2, there's even green banana flour sold for its RS2 content. I first discovered use of green bananas for GI maladies when seeking out more natural alternatives to medicines like Immodium AD. They're included in myriad lists of natural remedies... I've found just starting every day with one that's at least slightly green preemptively nips any potential GI problem in the bud, enabling me to then eat basically anything fearlessly for the next ~30hrs.
It appears that if you eat too much sugar over time it fucks your hunger signaling system so that you feel hungry even when you don’t need more calories. Or something like that.
Boiled, fried, in sweets, etc, rice is like 1/4th of what billions eat every day the way westerners eat bread or potatoes... You know, in Asia and everything...
Right, I'm just saying like, no one is having issues with too much calorie consumption cause they couldn't stop eating... rice. It would be just as weird as trying to take the calories out of lentils or beans. It's not a particularly calorie dense or indulgent food. Wtf is the point of eating it if you strip the calories out of it? that's what its for, its food.
Now something like butter or sugar, sure that makes sense. Calorie dense, and there are a lot of super tasty and addictive foods, that no one is eating as a meal, or to get full, that use a ton of of both of those ingredients.
China is facing a burgeoning obesity crisis. One might hope also that this research could be applied to corn, corn being probably half of the extra sugars in the US diet.
I can't speak for everyone but I did get obese eating rice. I ate a lot of it. In Asian diets, the one thing people often overindulge in is rice -- not everyone of course, but for those who do overindulge, their preferred carb is rice. (it's the same as eating too much bread and pasta in western diets, which is all too common among my friends)
When I cut back on my rice portions (1/4 cup uncooked vs 1 full cup), I went from 160 lbs to 150lbs.
At 160 lbs I had obstructive sleep apnea and felt really unhealthy overall. At 150 lbs now I feel so much better.
Im not sure that inventing ways to make rice less nutritious, in order to allow us to safely eat more, is going to help the various co2/water/food insecurity battles we now face. We need ways to feed more people with less food/energy, not new ways to shovel more food into fewer people.
It's not to help people eat more rice. It's do help people lose weight while eating the same amount when they are unable to change their diet dramatically.
In the end, they will eat even less because they lost weight.
Skeptical. If you have the will power or habit changing power to make rice such a
staple of your diet that this makes
a difference, then you also have the ability to just eat less food. Same thing.
A lot of our problems with food begin and end with the idea that we need to eat ginormous quantities of it, when moderation would fuel us just as well.
You're effectively saying "obese people, why don't you just eat less". This kind of "binary" thinking is actively harmful and toxic, and only demonstrates a complete lack of sympathy and understanding for people suffering from obesity. Obesity is extremely costly, and causes a lot of human suffering. Finding a way to reduce that suffering is unequivocally a good thing. Not that I expect this will be any kind of a panacea (it won't, as obesity is a complex behavioral phenomena).
On a purely utilitarian perspective, you're grossly underestimating how much broad impact obesity is having:
Aside from actual health issues causing others and leading to weight gain, diet and exercise is indeed the cure.
What is toxic is being offended at the very serious suggestion of eating less, especially when you flow it up with how bad being obese is for the rest of society.
You can feel bad for someone's plight without bending over backwards to pretend it's not curable by simply taking in less calories and moving more.
My sister had several miscarriages due to a thyroid medication she took. Once she stopped she carried to term, but gained weight.
She changed her diet and began working out, and has now been a certified personal trainer who specializes in obese clients for over 15 years.
One of her major stipulations for clients is mandatory caloric intake journals and meetings with nutritionists.
She despises above all else the coddling and mental gymnastics people will go through rather than make impactful changes.
We need to treat adults as such.
You say 'complex behavioral phenomenon', some say 'lack of willpower'.
Unfortunately, people have been preaching that gospel for decades and it has had no effect whatsoever on rising obesity rates. I’d like to see a strategy that actually works, because that ain’t it.
Funny thing, obesity rates are historically high, especially for the US.
The gospel of eat less/move more hasn't changed- you know what has? The garbage we eat has gotten worse and people as a whole move and exercise less.
Know what else has changed? The coddling, infantilization, and making up words so no one feels any shame or personal accountability.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that with movements like HAES(bullshit), plus size(obese) models, etc obesity rates skyrocket. Why not when you can eat anything and everything now and cry about it later.
I'm tired of other people's lack of self control becoming society's problems.
I smoke. I don't bemoan my lot and cry foul. It's my fault. I don't sit and wait for a magic pill while crying it's impossible to quit.
When I do quit, and go back to it from stress after years of being off them- I don't go about crying that cigarettes shouldn't be smoked by anyone or displayed everywhere to help me quit.
I don't demand people call smokers something that makes me feel less ashamed, and I damn sure wouldn't tell a doctor not to tell me to stop smoking and give me the same medical advice they'd give a non-smoker.
People need to act like adults and take personal responsibility.
It will also help diabetics. Rice is one of the foods I struggle with as the carb release can take longer to enter the bloodstream than the insulin that is injected.
This is a bad way to present the research, because yes removing calories from a food is kind of useless, but increasing resistant starch is good because dietary fiber is a nutrient. It feeds your gut bacteria.
Interesting observation: the countries in which traditionally the most amount of rice is consumed are not the ones facing the biggest problems with obesity.
Remarkable that people are so overfed we have to invent ways to make food less nutritious. This is the first time in all of the existence of humanity that this is a problem. crazy
You can also do this with potatoes. Repeated cooling/reheating is supposed to increase the RS levels, though I suppose to a limit. I imagine how effective this is varies with the individual, best way to tell how helpful this is for your particular situation would be to get a continuous blood glucose monitor since RS measurement is still not particularly easy to do or even standardized.
I am curious if this could be a way to increase the proportional nutrient content of rice, or if nutrient content will also be affected by an increase of RS.
Because of rising CO2 levels in our atmosphere crops are going to become more starchy and contain proportionally less nutrients as a result [1]. We’re either going to need to find ways to increase nutrient intake or reduce the starchyness of the food we eat.
If this helped release calories more slowly, making rice healthier, that would be one thing, but we should not be wasting research effort, let alone agricultural output, to make food actually less nutritious, especially when people are still going hungry.
I could see how this might be unpleasant. Making up to half the starch into something indigestible means it's still going somewhere...maybe unexpectedly and explosively.
100 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 88.2 ms ] threadFrom deep inside the article.
> "The team also will check out whether other oils besides coconut have this effect."
"In conclusion, cooling of cooked white rice increased resistant starch content. Cooked white rice cooled for 24 hours at 4°C then reheated lowered glycemic response compared with freshly cooked white rice."
it's the cooling, I don't understand why this isn't explained.
It seems microwaveable rice should benefit from this but probably not instant rice.
edited after reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_rice
It's well researched and have even been popularized and mentioned in every major diet source for decades: potatoes boiled and cook-off increases the RS levels and decreases G.I. and insulin spikes majorly.
Shouldn't need a whole team to develop this for rice as a "new way" with huge effort. Just trying it and measuring the results would be enough.
Well shit, I've got most of that at home. Fine Mr. Snarky Wizard, you win. You didn't have to be so mean about it.
Cool experiment. I grew up on that kind of material.
And as an aside, cold rice leads naturally to fried rice and cooking experiments there. Which is awesome.
The trick of not being obese is eating less.
One of options here is eating fewer times a day, but there's more than one option. Once you adjust you will have no problem eating less.
Citation needed...
Also worth considering that passenger aviation is on the same order of magnitude in terms of CO2 emissions. Remarkable given everyone has to eat.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Seems that's not a great play, long-term.
>Also worth considering that passenger aviation is on the same order of magnitude in terms of CO2 emissions. Remarkable given everyone has to eat.
Interesting. Since I don't have to fly, I don't. (I don't drive, either).
Oh wait, I think we already know this about sugar.
Basically, do the opposite of Soylent.
Generations of my ancestors had to eat potatoes to avoid starvation.
https://health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/2015/04/...
The Resistant Starch 2 (RS2) in green bananas has served as my bowel-regulating medicine for decades now. TFA makes me wonder if rice prepared this way could have a similar effect. It's a nuisance to keep green bananas onhand for breakfast daily, and once they turn yellow the RS2 has become sugar and the medicinal value is gone. Rice however...
Those last about a week before turning too yellow just hanging from a hook in the kitchen.
When I visited family in IL last summer it proved quite difficult and I was often visiting multiple stores on shopping trips just to find bananas remotely green. My quality of life jumps off a cliff every time I visit, this is part of why. The produce availability sucks there in general compared to CA.
You can get green banana powder, but it was so incredibly bitter the last time I tried that I never went back.
If I eat more than one in a day that's green it's so effective I'll end up constipated for a couple days. Never experimented with eating less than one, fortunately one seems to be the perfect unit of consumption for me, YMMV.
Are you using green bananas in a similar fashion?
This helps. Thank you!
I need my bananas to be completely free of green not even a tiny hint of green on the tip.
If I'm particularly sick with the runs, the first thing I look for is a banana so green peeling requires a knife and tastes like eating chalk. It fixes me right up within the hour, and I've never had negative effects. But on the day to day it's not so green, just green enough to not be sweet.
BTW this isn't some trail I'm blazing here. Green bananas are well known as a dietary source of RS2, there's even green banana flour sold for its RS2 content. I first discovered use of green bananas for GI maladies when seeking out more natural alternatives to medicines like Immodium AD. They're included in myriad lists of natural remedies... I've found just starting every day with one that's at least slightly green preemptively nips any potential GI problem in the bud, enabling me to then eat basically anything fearlessly for the next ~30hrs.
Now something like butter or sugar, sure that makes sense. Calorie dense, and there are a lot of super tasty and addictive foods, that no one is eating as a meal, or to get full, that use a ton of of both of those ingredients.
surely not due to rice consumption, though?
rice can be pretty caloric dense
When I cut back on my rice portions (1/4 cup uncooked vs 1 full cup), I went from 160 lbs to 150lbs.
At 160 lbs I had obstructive sleep apnea and felt really unhealthy overall. At 150 lbs now I feel so much better.
In the end, they will eat even less because they lost weight.
Shit diet (cakes, bacon, fries etc.) -> heavy low carb rice diet
Shit diet -> Good diet (balanced, carbs, protein, fat, veggies)
I would say the second transition is easier. Perhaps more expensive though.
A lot of our problems with food begin and end with the idea that we need to eat ginormous quantities of it, when moderation would fuel us just as well.
Food problems (famine etc) in the modern world is not because of lack of food. It's because of human errors (policies, logistics)
A different kind of puffed rice with sugar added is known as the breakfast cereal Rice Krispies.
On a purely utilitarian perspective, you're grossly underestimating how much broad impact obesity is having:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3047996/
Just look at the fuel cost and the environmental cost and explain to me how helping reducing obesity is not a good thing for the environment.
That is not what the GP said. The objection was about long term resource distribution...it's right there in the short post.
> co2/water/food insecurity battles we now face
The comment about individual consumption was incidental, not targeted. This selective outrage response, is woefully misplaced.
What is toxic is being offended at the very serious suggestion of eating less, especially when you flow it up with how bad being obese is for the rest of society.
You can feel bad for someone's plight without bending over backwards to pretend it's not curable by simply taking in less calories and moving more.
My sister had several miscarriages due to a thyroid medication she took. Once she stopped she carried to term, but gained weight.
She changed her diet and began working out, and has now been a certified personal trainer who specializes in obese clients for over 15 years.
One of her major stipulations for clients is mandatory caloric intake journals and meetings with nutritionists.
She despises above all else the coddling and mental gymnastics people will go through rather than make impactful changes.
We need to treat adults as such.
You say 'complex behavioral phenomenon', some say 'lack of willpower'.
The gospel of eat less/move more hasn't changed- you know what has? The garbage we eat has gotten worse and people as a whole move and exercise less.
Know what else has changed? The coddling, infantilization, and making up words so no one feels any shame or personal accountability.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that with movements like HAES(bullshit), plus size(obese) models, etc obesity rates skyrocket. Why not when you can eat anything and everything now and cry about it later.
I'm tired of other people's lack of self control becoming society's problems.
I smoke. I don't bemoan my lot and cry foul. It's my fault. I don't sit and wait for a magic pill while crying it's impossible to quit.
When I do quit, and go back to it from stress after years of being off them- I don't go about crying that cigarettes shouldn't be smoked by anyone or displayed everywhere to help me quit.
I don't demand people call smokers something that makes me feel less ashamed, and I damn sure wouldn't tell a doctor not to tell me to stop smoking and give me the same medical advice they'd give a non-smoker.
People need to act like adults and take personal responsibility.
Because of rising CO2 levels in our atmosphere crops are going to become more starchy and contain proportionally less nutrients as a result [1]. We’re either going to need to find ways to increase nutrient intake or reduce the starchyness of the food we eat.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/06/19/616098095/as...
If this helped release calories more slowly, making rice healthier, that would be one thing, but we should not be wasting research effort, let alone agricultural output, to make food actually less nutritious, especially when people are still going hungry.