Scientists find an easy way to cook rice that could cut calories in half

Rice is a staple in many cuisines around the world, and it’s pretty much what keeps college students alive (alongside instant noodles).

But even though the versatile grain is cheap and easy to cook, it’s not great for your waistline, which is a big problem.

In fact, one cup of cooked rice has about 240 calories from starch, which can quickly turn into fat if they aren’t burned off.

But researchers in Sri Lanka have found a simple way to cook the grain that cuts its calories by as much as 50 percent and has other important health benefits. And now we’ll never cook rice any other way.

According to a study from 2015, all you need to do is bring a pot of water to a boil. Before you add the raw rice, you add about 3% of the weight of the rice in coconut oil.

So, that’s about a teaspoon for half a cup of rice, says Sudhair James, an undergraduate chemistry student at the College of Chemical Sciences in Sri Lanka who led the research with his supervisor.

In March 2015, he gave a talk about the work at the American Chemical Society’s National Meeting and Exposition.

“After it was done, we put it in the fridge for about 12 hours to cool down. So long, “Roberto A. Ferdman from The Washington Post was told this by James.

To eat it, you just put it in the microwave, and presto, you have much healthier “fluffy white rice.”

Easy, right? But the process is actually pretty interesting from a food chemistry point of view. The idea behind the method is that not all starches are made the same.

There are two main types: digestible starches, which our bodies quickly turn into glucose and store as fat if we don’t burn it up, and resistant starches, which aren’t broken down into glucose in the stomach, so they have fewer calories.

Instead, they move on to the large intestine, where they act more like dietary fiber and can help the gut in many ways.

Even though many starchy foods, like potatoes and rice, start out with a lot of resistant starches, when we cook them, they often change chemically so that they are mostly digestible starches by the time we eat them.

Researchers had already noticed that, strangely, fried rice and rice made in a pilaf style seem to have more resistant starch than steamed rice.

And a study from 2014 showed that the amount of resistant starch in pasta went up by a lot if you let it cool down before reheating and eating it. So James and his boss, Pushparajah Thavarajah, decided to dig deeper.

They tried cooking 38 different types of Sri Lankan rice in eight different ways and found that by adding a fat like coconut oil before cooking and then cooling the rice right away, they could change the starch in the finished product so that it had more resistant starch.

The oil works by getting into contact with the molecules of starch and changing how they are put together. “If the rice is left to cool for 12 hours, hydrogen bonds will form between the amylose molecules on the outside of the grains. This also makes the starch resistant,” James said in a press release.

And he says that reheating the rice doesn’t change the amount of resistant starch.

So far, the two scientists have only looked at the chemical changes in the type of rice that had the most starch to begin with. They found that they could cut the amount of digestible starch by 15 times. This was also linked to a 10–15 percent drop in the number of calories.

James and Thavarajah will now test the method on the best natural strain of rice, Suduru Samba. They think that this will lead to a 50–60% drop in calories. They are also trying out different kinds of lipids, like sunflower oil.

This new way of cooking could lead to new pre-packaged rice that has already been cooked in fat and cooled, is ready to heat up in the microwave, and has a lot fewer calories than what is currently available.

Even better, the team now thinks that the same method could be used to make other starchy foods we love healthier. Thavarajah told Ferdman, “It’s about more than rice.”

Could we do the same thing with bread? That’s really the question.

Team, I’m not trying to downplay how great your work is, but I think the real question here is whether we can do the same thing with potatoes. Because if we could find a way to make fries with half the calories, I’d be set for life.