Sunday Times 2
Want rice with half the calories? Cook it with coconut oil
Do you love rice but are worried about your weight?
The good news is scientists have now discovered a way to reduce the calorie content by 60 per cent – simply by the way it is cooked.
Cooking the rice with coconut oil, and then cooling it for 12 hours in the fridge, more than halved the number of calories in the rice when it was eaten.
However, doctors have previously warned that eating reheated rice can cause food poisoning, and so advise making sure the rice is steaming hot all the way through before eating it.
They also advise leaving the rice in the fridge no more than a day before reheating. The Sri Lankan researchers experimented with 38 kinds of rice from the country.
Their recommended method of preparing the rice increases the amount of resistant starch inside it, which is indigestible to the human body. Therefore this resistant starch is not absorbed and turned into energy or fat, and has no calories.
The scientists found a two-step process that was able to increase the amount of resistant starch in rice by 10 times. First, they added a teaspoon of coconut oil to boiling water, adding half a cup (105g) of rice, and then either simmering it for 40 minutes, or boiling it for 20 to 25 minutes.
Then, they put the rice in the fridge for 12 hours to cool
Lead researcher Sudhair James, of The College of Chemical Sciences, Sri Lanka, said if the best variety of rice is prepared using this method, ‘it might reduce the calories by about 50-60 per cent.’
He said the team wanted to find food-based solutions to the problem of obesity in developing countries, where rice is often a staple food.
© Daily Mail, London