Cookaholics Bulletin Board

"An undergraduate student and his professor at the University of Sri Lanka have been tinkering with a new way to cook rice that can reduce its calories by as much as 50 percent and even offer a few other added health benefits."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/won ... -calories/

If this works out at home, I would be okay with cooking my rice a day ahead!

--Lisa

The article was very interesting. I always add bacon fat to my rice, but will experiment with coconut oil next time I make some. I always make 3 cups rice at a time which means I always have refrigerated leftovers. I sometimes cook it a day before I need it. Glad to know I was lowering my calorie intake.

Which coconut oil would you use? We eat a lot of rice.

Thanks.

Lisa,

Thanks for the article! Interesting ... if only their math worked ....

Skeptic's corner time!

The scientists in the article are making a major omission: they aren't accounting for the calories of the coconut oil at all. This kinda blows away their theory.

So 1 cup raw rice makes around 2 cups cooked rice, which is around 430 calories (depending on type). The researchers claim to be saving 12% (not 50%, read down to the end of the article) of this due to converting starch, which is 52 calories.

However, to do this, they are adding 7 grams of coconut oil (210g * 0.03). Coconut oil has 9 calories per gram. Which means they've added 63 grams of fat calories to the rice.

Which means that the rice now actually has 7 *more* calories than when they started. If they could actually reduce calories by 40% or 50% the balance would tip the other way, but note that they haven't demonstrated that.

Mind you, if you like fat in your rice anyway, this is good news; if their theory is right, it means that you can add a small amount (2 tsp) of fat to your rice without adding calories. But as a weight-loss method, it's a bust.

Thank you, and this has been Skeptic's Corner! Join us again next week!

Good point Josh. However I always add fat to my white rice, so making it ahead seems worth trying. Bacon fat has about the same calories as the coconut oils I have, so I'll stick with that. If I was using coconut oil, I'd want refined so no coconut taste.

This post needs a Like button.

--Lisa

I skimmed the article with the intention of coming back to look at the fat issue, but thankfully Fuzzy did it for me! Thanks, Fuzzy!

I suspect the researchers might like to draw a distinction between kinds of calories, and their different effects. I'm not sold on that concept yet; sure, there is some research that says calories from starch are so different then calories from fat we should be treating them completely differently, but that needs to be pretty strong before I'll believe it so easily.

Also, I'm pretty sure that eating less rice is a better solution to calories in rice.

Yeah, or that.

I'll also point out that for most of the population of SE Asia, getting too many calories isn't the problem. Quite the opposite, really.

Kind of on the same theme but with no added fat. http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/health ... t-starches

I listen to her podcast, very sane nutritional information.

Mary

When it comes to the science, I am not sure a case has been made for a cause and effect relationship between the added fat and and magic "shedding" of calories. Food science has always attributed the starch retrogradation to simple cooling.