Cooking white rice with coconut oil and then cooling it in the fridge could drastically cut the kilojoules it contains and make your
gut healthier, researchers told a recent US scientific meeting.
A new rice cooking method, which could cut its kilojoules by as much as half, was one of the sexier topics presented at a recent meeting of chemistry experts.
The paper combined the hot topics of carbohydrates (in this case, rice), coconut oil (touted by celebrities and others as a miracle fat that can do everything from control sugar cravings to boost your immunity),gut bacteria (the microbes in our intestines that are increasingly recognised as important in preventing disease) and weight loss. (It also touched on food poisoning and flatulence.)
The new method involves adding a touch of coconut oil to rice (around a teaspoon for half a cup of rice), which you then cook as you normally would, before cooling in the refrigerator for about 12 hours.
The cooking and cooling together increase the amount of a type of indigestible starch in the rice known as resistant starch.
Since the body can’t break down and absorb the energy from resistant starch, you end up with low-cal rice. “If the best rice variety is processed, we might reduce the calories by as much as 50 to 60 per cent”, predicts team leader Sudhair James, from the College of Chemical Sciences in Sri Lanka.
My Comments:
Adding any oil during the cooking process of rice as in Lamprai or Buriyani delays absorption of the digested rice and spiking of sugar level in the blood may be minimised. Such preparations are good for diabetics, especially when red or brown unprocessed rice is used. But the problem is regular consumption may tend to increase your weight.
Check your blood sugar level before the mean and 2 hours after the meal. You will be suprised to note that the sugar level hasnt risen to a spiky level agter eating rice using any oil in the preparation.
Fat delays the absorption of digested rice.
What the above research paper written by Sudhair states is that keeping the rice cooked with coconut oil and leaving in the fridge overnight reduces the calaries in the rice is in the starch within and difficult to believe that the calorie content drops keeping the boiled rice in the fridge overnight. Sudhair refers to this rice as resistant rice.
No researched studies are been shown and this may be just surmising.
What we can believe is such rice cooked adding coconut oil delays the absorption lowering the GL(glycaemic index) but is difficult to undestand how the calorie content of such rice is reduced by half.
Harold Gunatilake – Health writer.
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