LOW-CALORIE RICE
If you love eating rice but also need to lose weight, you’ll be glad to hear about Sudhair James’ research. An undergraduate student at the College of Chemical Sciences in Sri Lanka, James and his mentor have apparently found a way to reduce the calories of cooked rice by up to 50 percent.C
“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,” James told the Washington Post. “After it was ready, we let it cool in the refrigerator for about 12 hours. That’s it.”
The process converts digestible starch to resistant starch, which not only reduces calories but also offers a number of health benefits.
“The oil interacts with the starch in rice and changes its architecture,” said James, who recently presented his preliminary research at the National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Denver. “Chilling the rice then helps foster the conversion of starches. The result is a healthier serving, even when you heat it back up.”
Thanks to James’ research, rice lovers may eventually replace their automatic rice cookers with automatic rice calorie-cutting cooker-coolers.
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