Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that cuts the calories
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Rice is normally not the best for turning to resistant starch I believe, the process works a lot better for potatoes: cook, then chill, voilá. Even re-heating preserves some of the benefits. Not sure if, or how, the added coconut oil mentioned in the article would alter the process, or make it more effective.
That said, I'd rather have the short chain fatty acids than the excess carbs, so it seems a fair trade off to me.
[0]- http://www.precisionnutrition.com/all-about-resistant-starch
So healthier, but not "less calories" really, especially with the Coconut oil added (MCFA do have slightly less calories than LCFA, but not all of Coconut oil consists of MCFA).
I'm all about this though, and will probably give it a try myself (I like refried rice).
I've never met anyone who cooks rice by boiling the water first. Maybe it's an Indian thing, but all the people who've ever shown me 'the right way' to make rice in SE Asian cooking, stretching from Japan to Vietnam, rinse the rice a few times and then cook it from cold. The 'trick' for good rice is using the right amount of water and adjusting the heat to a low simmer when it boils.
My (Asian) wife adds that she's heard of it but 'we thought that's how white people like rice.' ¯\(°_o)/¯
"After it was ready, we let it cool in the refrigerator for about 12 hours. That's it."
Again, who eats their rice ice-cold unless they got take out the previous evening? Rice isn't that nice cold, nor is it absorbent enough to mop up sauces with, which is sort of a key thing in most Asian cuisine because it's always consumed as an accompaniment to something else, no matter how basic.
Source: Am white person. (from southeast Louisiana if it matters)
Believe me, I've already heard all the objections to my rice habits. b^)
According to many, the best fried rice is made with cooked refrigerated rice. Also, there's this excerpt in the article "Chilling the rice then helps foster the conversion of starches. The result is a healthier serving, even when you heat it back up."
Still not convinced that turning a 30 minute process into a 12 hour one is "simple".
So, if people are going to try this they need to cool the rice down as quickly as possible; keep it cold; and then properly reheat it.
http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/can-reheating-rice-cause-food-po...
Inactive prep time doesn't add much in the way of complexity.
Then I asked a friend who worked at a fine dining sushi/sashimi place how much they wash their rice. Minimum 6 washes. I guess it's not much of a joke anymore.
Standard practice for pressure cooking rice. Bring water to boil, add rice, stir, close lid and raise to pressure.
Brown rice in 14 minutes. Yum!
Ummm, you could heat it up. I don't think the article implied you had to eat it cold to get the benefit.
Totally agree with you on the cooking method, though. I read that bit and shook my head.
In Brazil, on the other hand, people would put a tiny bit of water, put the rice in, turn the stove on and then wait until the rice is evaporated.
The main difference I notice is that when cooked with plenty of water and added when the water is boiling the rice doesn't get sticky (unless you overcook it like crazy.) I prefer it loose and solid instead of sticky and mushy, but then, I grew up eating it that way.
Obesity is an emerging health crisis in many developing countries. To find food based solutions for obesity, rice resistant starch (RS) concentrations and novel ways to increase RS concentrations were studied. A total of 38 Sri Lankan rice varieties were tested; the RS concentrations ranged from 0.30 to 4.65%. The traditional rice varieties had significantly higher RS concentrations than old and improved varieties. Bg 305 had the least RS concentration out of all. However, applying different heating and cooling conditions with pure coconut oil showed RS concentrations increased by at least 10 times. The increase in RS content could be attributed to the increase in RS3 and RS5 types, suggesting potential to increase these types of RS in rice. This study results clearly show that rice, when cooked properly, could be a good low calorie food source for obesity reduction. In-vivo glycemic effects of RS studies are in progress.
Furthermore, the effects and benefits of the cooking method are also unclear. Obesity is no doubt the most complex problem in all medical science to unravel as every body system is implicated in its origin and continuation. Obesity treatment is extremely difficult because of the tremendous level of parallelism inherent in the processes of energy storage and utilization.
For this research to be pragmatically significant, it needs to be convincingly shown that consuming this rice vs that rice matters, and that this single change produces a difference in adiposity. My experience as an obesity treatment specialist suggests it's unlikely that will happen.
A problem resulting from thousands of contributing (and highly variable) factors is not going to be solved by altering some small subset of elements. Understanding the nature of the problem is a herculean task. But until a clearer picture emerges, all we will do is nibble at the edges.
Perhaps a less revolutionary idea to reduce the calories in the rice you eat by 50%: eat 50% less rice.
Eating less actually works for all people, it's just hard to commit to. Restricting calories is uncomfortable.
If people are less able to comply with a program than an alternative program, then the first program, in fact, works less well (if it can even be said to work at all) for them.
So the two halves of this statement are opposed.
If you look at statistics from Europe at the end of WW2, or from the late 1930s in the US, how many obese people were there? Pretty much zero, because food was scarce.
Without getting into the discussion of whether or not your problem is simply equivocation because you are interpreting "unable" in a different sense than those using it (or, e.g., the medical community) would in this context, "eating less" in the context of this discussion was eating less volume of food with the same calorie density, and the post to which you responded was pointing out that that is, in practice, not as successful for some people as eating similar volumes of food with lower calorie content.
Both of these methods are equally "eating less" in a caloric balance sense. The set of processes that affect processes related to wait loss (including both processes that control how much of that energy content is actually made available, and processes that might be viewed as compliance-related in terms of satiety triggers on the input side and processes that make people prone or resistant to activity on the output side) have substantial, well-known, biological variation between individuals, which have significant linkages to propensity for obesity.
Treating the issue one of simply calories in vs. calories out with success outcomes differentiated only by moral features like willpower is a stupid statement which is proven false by a vast body of research on metabolism, obesity, etc.
The advice "eat less move more" is a proven loser. Not really even a question. Time to move on. Maybe low carb/IF/less time-consuming HIIT will do better. But we know move more, eat less has failed. Being more smug about the fact it would work if only all these dummy pilots would use it right isn't going to improve the public health success rate.
We're also trying to figure out how to increase the nutritional values of foods that tend to be available to areas where inadequate food supplies are problematic (e.g., cassava.) Different groups of people have different, and often opposite, problems, and research can be directed at more than one of them at a time.
> At the same time we're coming up with stuff like Soylent because we're worried that we're using too much of our resources to produce foods.
I've yet to see any coherent explanation of how a heavily processed food like Soylent can be anything but an increase in the resources to produce food. Might, optimistically, reduce the resource cost to deliver and store food compared to some other alternatives. Mostly, though, its seems to be an attempt to make money by selling convenience to people with who aren't particularly concerned for other features of food (other than perhaps a certain very broad nutritional profile.)
> Perhaps a less revolutionary idea to reduce the calories in the rice you eat by 50%: eat 50% less rice.
A number of people find it much easier to reduce calories first (by eating less calorie-dense foods, but with similar volumes) and then reduce volumes (potentially adding back more calorie-dense foods in the process, or perhaps further reducing calories in the process.)
You can address real people's problems more effectively when you deal with them being how they are rather than how you would wish them to be.
They can already do that. There already exists high-volume , low-calorie food. The target market here is clearly not the people making that choice.
I genuinely have trouble caring about people whose problems are caused by making the active choice to keep putting food in the hole in the front of their head. Unpopular view, I expect, but true. Absolutely a self-inflicted injury, and making less nutritious food to indulge these people is sickening, and frankly insulting to them. They've made their choice.
Yeah, sure, maybe it IS a medical condition, and there is something massively wrong with these people's brain chemistry that means they're physically incapable of telling when they're not hungry, and they're too stupid to realise that eating five kilos of rice every day and being horrifically overweight is a clue that they're doing something wrong, or maybe they're masively emotionally damaged and stuck in some kind of self-loathing spiral that makes them eat more and more in some kind of slow suicide, but deliberately making food less nutritious is grotesque, and indulging these people in entirely the wrong way.
I suspect that they'll simply eat twice as much of this new half-calorie rice, or just top it up with a big loaf of bread.
When I want to lose weight, I just eat much less--typically ~800 calories per day. But that's a struggle to beat hunger. And yes, I'm hungry--I have no idea why you would think people aren't hungry just because they're overweight. I like to feel satiated, and maybe that means something different to me than it does to you. But when I need to lose weight, I just ignore hunger. Not everyone is blessed with that kind of willpower.
When people ask me "how can I do what you did and lose 40lbs in 2 months?", my answer is just like yours--quit eating so much.
However if they had the choice to feel as satiated for half the calories, I expect they'd lose weight. I don't know why you imagine they'd eat twice as much--they have no idea how many calories are in the food, typically. They eat and drink as much as they want to each day without respect to any calories. Changing diet to an already-existing high-volume, low-calorie food is not nearly as good of a solution as modifying people's existing diet. It's also not making it "less nutritious,"--in fact, for these people, it's more nutritious in a sense--at least better for their health.
Your whole stance is basically a "fuck those people, I don't have that problem" stance. If you're a programmer, it'd be similar to "Vim is the best text editor, so I have no sympathy for anyone who can't use it properly. We shouldn't develop other editors, deliberately making people less productive is grotesque..." etc.
Obesity is an epidemic and any progress to thwart it is good, necessary work. It improves people in so many ways--physical health, self-esteem, career, relationships, etc.
In this part of the thread it has gone that way, although I wouldn't word it as "fuck those people", but that they're people capable of making choices, and they're choosing to eat too much. "Fuck those people" is more emotive than I feel about it. It's their choice. What problem? There's no problem. If they want to eat less, they can. Barring brain damage or serious psychological disturbance, they're human and humans are more than capable of deciding what to eat. It's not "fuck those people", it's "they're making a choice and it's none of my business".
I do genuinely believe that. I wouldn't even call it willpower. I'm not convinced any such thing really exists; people make choices. That's all there is. I feel hungry, but I know I don't actually need to eat this. Make a choice and in doing so pick how I'm going to feel; I can keep feeling hungry, or I can not keep feeling hungry, weighed up with factors and knowledge I possess.
My stance in the bigger thread is that the idea of deliberately removing nutritional content from food is grotesque. Sure, we in the rich world have never known hunger (not the kind you feel when you haven't had anything with sugar in it for a few hours, but the kind that grinds people into dust over years and ends up with people selecting which of their family should die first), but it's still a real thing and yes, sure, it's just about free market economics and if the rich world can afford to deliberately destroy nutritional value to make life a little bit more convenient for themselves that's just how international trade goes, but nonetheless it makes me sick. That's what I feel is fucking grotesque; so much of humanity's history has been a struggle to get enough food and famine was a perpetual real issue, and sure, this is modern times in the first world and now we can just destroy the calorie content of food for our own convenience, but still, what the fuck.
Addendum: I have no idea why you would think people aren't hungry just because they're overweight. Is that from what I said about some people not able to tell when they're not hungry? I understand that's a real medical issue some people have. Their body/brain doesn't work right in that sense and when they've eaten enough, the hunger doesn't fade as it should.
Likewise, eating can be fun and pleasurable, but be aware of the risks and make sensible decisions.
Deliberately making food less nutritious so that you can shovel more of it into your mouth is akin to bulimia without the vomiting. Doing it should be a big loud alarm inside someone's head, but if they're damaged enough already to seriously consider it, it probably doesn't. Helping these people indulge themselves is grotesque.
By their nature of being underage, they cannot understand the risks and be sensible. We can help so they won't have completely crazy ideas such as Mnt. Dew being a contraceptive, but they cannot be fully informed nor make the best decisions.
>Likewise, eating can be fun and pleasurable, but be aware of the risks and make sensible decisions.
Considering the multi-billion dollar industry making it as fun and pleasurable as possible so you won't make sensible decisions, this doesn't seem like a fair challenge.
I'm sitting here trying to think of recipes other than blindingly obvious (like fried rice) that must contain heaping piles of rice and can't simply just have more "good stuff" piled on the rice.
Its the same way with unhealthy flavored sauces. I know general tso sauce is nearly pure corn syrup and therefore is bad for me so I use the stuff like people use hot sauce, a taste is enough, a couple drops on each bite and I'm smiling. There's no reason I have to dump the entire bottle of sauce on a couple pieces of grilled chicken.
Given that the "good stuff" tastes better than the rice itself I'm not seeing an appetite or self control problem? Go ahead torture me with extra homemade lemon pepper steamed fish and less of bland tasteless blah rice?
We can employ in all sorts of use cases:
* Solve global hunger problems? Give starving people more food. * End crime? Just everybody stop committing crimes. * Debilitating OCD? Just stop washing your hands.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/an-iron-...
Its quite practical in a place where refrigerators are available. I suspect many of the places where rice is a staple food and transition from bare subsistence to a more robust living standard in a historically short period of time has resulted in an upswing of obesity as eating habits adapted to up and down cycles don't work as well with stronger and longer up cycles probably see a substantial overlap between the population this would hope to serve and the population for which refrigerating prepared food for 12 hours before consuming isn't a completely unrealistic prep step, even if its not something you'd do at home every meal.
And even to the extent it is, part of what they've said is that they are looking into how this could be developed into a pre-consumer process.
You can cycle this process every 12 hours by having new rice on a delay when you leave for work, so it's cooked when you return home and you can put that in the fridge for the morning or lunch. It may not be 12 hours exactly but it's close. Or just save big batches.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29629761
Both articles sound borderline one-weird-trick to me, but the explanations are plausible.
Are there any studies linking rice consumption to higher obesity rates?
AFAIK, these populations have relied on rice for ages and their obesity rates have only spiked recently.
Am I the only one disturbed by this statement? Sure, many people are conditioned to get emotional comfort from eating, but I've seen no evidence it's hard wired. I'm not saying one should hate food, but I find it as unhealthy to have a relationship with food where you use it to fill an emotional void, and I suspect it's a major cause of obesity in places like America. If an obese person lost their emotional attachment to food and stopped eating unconsciously, I'd be surprised if they didn't drop to a healthy weight.
None the less the concept is going to seem weird to people roughly older than the meme and self evident to everyone younger.
There's much, much, much more to it than this.
To make it even worse, things that make us feel good are things we can get in the habit of doing (i.e. addicted) very easily. To make it even worse, you have to eat. If you're addicted to marijuana (assuming it's purely psychological addiction here) you don't have to smoke a less fulfilling joint every day (reminding you of the more fulfilling joint you could be smoking), you can just quit cold turkey (which is also hard but less so). A lot of obese people are literally addicted to unhealthy food since it provides so much more stimulus than our brains were evolved to handle.
And to make it even worse, being obese tends to lead to low self-esteem and a common way to assuage self-esteem issues is to engage in pleasurable activity... like eating more unhealthy food. It's a vicious cycle of eating poorly, getting fat, then eating poorly to comfort oneself, getting fatter, eating more, etc. It can be very difficult to break the cycle, both because of the super-stimulatory nature of the food and because it's impossible to just quit eating cold turkey. Every healthy meal is a reminder of the addiction you could be feeding and with the high availability of poor food (especially in the US), it's even harder to stay healthy.
In short, we are of wired to find bad food comforting in a roundabout way, and the problem is far harder than you give it credit for.
Plus, eating half as much works with all foods, not just rice! :)
for more info click the link :
If there's no change in flavor or texture, this preparation seems like a win win.