Simple rice-cooking hack could reduce calories by 60 per centhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor
11:58AM GMT 23 Mar 2015
Cooking rice with a teaspoon of coconut oil then refrigerating it for 12 hours more than halves the number of calories absorbed by the body, scientists have shown
It sounds too good to be true but a simple change to the way rice is cooked could reduce its calorie content by 60 per cent.
Scientists in Sri Lanka have discovered that cooking rice with a teaspoon of coconut oil then refrigerating it for 12 hours more than halves the number of calories absorbed by the body. The change remains even if it is reheated.
The researchers from the College of Chemical Sciences in Colombo, Sri Lanka, say simply changing the way rice is cooked could help tackle the obesity epidemic.
"Because obesity is a growing health problem, especially in many developing countries, we wanted to find food-based solutions," says Dr Sudhair 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."
By using a specific heating and cooking regimen, he says, the scientists concluded that "if the best rice variety is processed, it might reduce the calories by about 50-60 percent."
Rice contains around 240 calories per cup. The trick to bringing down the calorie content is by changing how the body digests it.
Usually the starchy carbohydrates in rice are broken down in the small intestine where they become glucose and are eventually stored as fat. However, cooking rice with a teaspoon of coconut oil, and then chilling for 12 hours appears to make half of the carbohydrate indigestible so it passes through the body without becoming fat.
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