Scientists Have Discovered a Simple Way to Cook Rice That Dramatically Cuts the Calories

Rice is popular around the world because it pairs well with a lot of different kinds of foods and is relatively cheap. But like other starch-heavy foods, it has one central flaw: it isn't that good for you. White rice consumption, in particular, has been linked to a higher risk of diabetes. A cup of the cooked grain carries with it roughly 200 calories, most of which comes in the form of starch, which turns into sugar, and often thereafter body fat.

But what if there were a simple way to tweak rice ever so slightly to make it much healthier?

An undergraduate student and his professor at the University of Sri Lanka has found a way to cook rice and reduce its calories by as much as 50 percent and even offer a few other added health benefits. 

And it only involves a few easy steps.

How to cook it:

"What we did is cook the rice as you normally do, but when the water is boiling, before adding the raw rice, we added coconut oil—about 3 percent of the weight of the rice you're going to cook," said Sudhair James, who presented his preliminary research at National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) on Monday. "After it was ready, we let it cool in the refrigerator for about 12 hours. That's it."

There is a wee bit of food chemistry you need to understand to know how it works.

How it works:

Not all starches are created equal. Some, known as digestible starches, take only a little time to digest, are quickly turned into glucose, and then later glycogen. Excess glycogen ends up adding to the size of our guts if we don't expend enough energy to burn it off. Other starches, meanwhile, called resistant starches, take a long time to for the body to process, aren't converted into glucose or glycogen because we lack the ability to digest them, and add up to less calories. 

A growing body of research has shown that it might be possible to change the types of starches found in foods by modifying how they are prepared. At the very least, we know that there are observable changes when certain foods are cooked different ways.

Potatoes, for instance, go from having the right kind of starch to the less healthful kind when they are cooked or mashed (sigh). The process of heating and cooling certain vegetables, like peas and sweet potatoes, can also alter the amount of resistant (good) starches, according to a 2009 study. And rice, depending on the method of preparation, undergoes observable chemical changes. Most notably, fried rice and pilaf style rice have a greater proportion of resistant starch than the most commonly eaten type, steamed rice, as strange as that might seem.

"If you can reduce the digestible starch in something like steamed rice, you can reduce the calories," said Dr. Pushparajah Thavarajva, a professor at the University of Sri Lanka who is supervising the research. "The impact could be huge."

"The oil interacts with the starch in rice and changes its architecture," said James. "Chilling the rice then helps foster the conversion of starches. The result is a healthier serving, even when you heat it back up."

"It's about more than rice," said Thavarajva. "I mean, can we do the same thing for bread? That's the real question here."