Rice can be the perfect accompaniment to many dishes – but its not exactly the healthiest choice.
Scientists, however, are developing a way to cut the calorie content by half.
A normal cup of rice contains around 240 calories but by adding a teaspoon of coconut oil to the water before cooking it and then refrigerating the food for 12 hours after cooking, you can cut that.
Starch can be digestible or indigestible, also known as resistant starch. The researchers reasoned that if they could transform digestible starch into resistant starch, then that could lower the number of usable calories of the rice.
Unlike digestible types of starch, resistant starch is not broken down in the small intestine, where carbohydrates normally are metabolised into glucose and other simple sugars and absorbed into the bloodstream.
The research, which was presented in 2015 at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), involved looking at 38 different rice from Sri Lanka.
By adding the oil to the water, before adding half a cup of rice, simmering for 40 minutes and then refrigerating for 12 hours, they found there was 10 times more resistant starch, compared to normal rice.
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Because obesity is a growing health problem, especially in many developing countries, we wanted to find food-based solutions,” says team leader Sudhair A. James, who is at the College of Chemical Sciences, Colombo, Western, Sri Lanka.
We discovered that increasing rice resistant starch (RS) concentrations was a novel way to approach the problem.
After your body converts carbohydrates into glucose, any leftover fuel gets converted into a polysaccharide carbohydrate called glycogen, he explains.
Your liver and muscles store glycogen for energy and quickly turn it back into glucose as needed. The issue is that the excess glucose that doesnt get converted to glycogen ends up turning into fat, which can lead to excessive weight or obesity.
As 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.
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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.
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