14 ms·

Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that cuts the calories

62 points by alexcasalboni 12y ago

farresito 12y ago
If I'm going to eat rice, it's because of the carbs it has, so I'm fine with the amount of calories it has, but I see how it can be useful for certain people.
zdean 12y ago
There are people around the world starving because they don't have access to enough calories and we're trying to figure out how to reduce the caloric values of foods. At the same time we're coming up with stuff like Soylent because we're worried that we're using too much of our resources to produce foods. What a strange set of circumstances. Perhaps a less revolutionary idea to reduce the calories in the rice you eat by 50%: eat 50% less rice.
- Splendor 12y ago
  While simply eating less works for most people I think this is a little dismissive of other factors at work in the obesity epidemic.
  - zdean 12y ago
    Such as food subsidies that make high calorie/low value foods cheaper than they otherwise would be? Or the over-availability to the most at-risk populations of these high calorie/low value foods? I'm not sure how lowering the caloric density of a food is going to lower the incentive to eating too much food. In fact, I could easily see it doing the opposite.
  - dublinben 12y ago
    >eating less works for most people Eating less actually works for all people, it's just hard to commit to. Restricting calories is uncomfortable.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Eating less actually works for all people, it's just hard to commit to. If people are less able to comply with a program than an alternative program, then the first program, in fact, works less well (if it can even be said to work at all) for them. So the two halves of this statement are opposed.
      - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
        The problem is when some people claim that they just become overweight because of their genes, and are unable to lose weight by eating less. This is a stupid statement which is proven false by basic thermodynamics, and this should be pointed out. If you look at statistics from Europe at the end of WW2, or from the late 1930s in the US, how many obese people were there? Pretty much zero, because food was scarce.
        jessaustin 12y ago
        I don't think your proposal to fight more wars to destroy the global economy and make food scarce will appeal to many people outside the armaments industry.
        oldmanjay 12y ago
        Did you have a point or were you just posting to feel superior to strawman fat people?
        semi-extrinsic 12y ago
        I was replying to parent who was basically saying that a process does not work if people are unwilling to try the process. This statement is false. If I am unwilling to replace the broken on exhaust on my car, it does not mean that it's impossible for me to fix my car.
        npsimons 12y ago
        Exactly. You can't beat the second law of thermodynamics. I'm really disappointed in the level of fatlogic in the comments here, and the downvotes for pointing out simple facts.
  - digikata 12y ago
    We are also living in a world economy which is constrained (among other factors) by energy inputs, water, and arable land. So a method of reducing calorie intake of a food after you've spent the resources to produce a crop seems... well, wasteful.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > There are people around the world starving because they don't have access to enough calories and we're trying to figure out how to reduce the caloric values of foods. We're also trying to figure out how to increase the nutritional values of foods that tend to be available to areas where inadequate food supplies are problematic (e.g., cassava.) Different groups of people have different, and often opposite, problems, and research can be directed at more than one of them at a time. > At the same time we're coming up with stuff like Soylent because we're worried that we're using too much of our resources to produce foods. I've yet to see any coherent explanation of how a heavily processed food like Soylent can be anything but an increase in the resources to produce food. Might, optimistically, reduce the resource cost to deliver and store food compared to some other alternatives. Mostly, though, its seems to be an attempt to make money by selling convenience to people with who aren't particularly concerned for other features of food (other than perhaps a certain very broad nutritional profile.) > Perhaps a less revolutionary idea to reduce the calories in the rice you eat by 50%: eat 50% less rice. A number of people find it much easier to reduce calories first (by eating less calorie-dense foods, but with similar volumes) and then reduce volumes (potentially adding back more calorie-dense foods in the process, or perhaps further reducing calories in the process.) You can address real people's problems more effectively when you deal with them being how they are rather than how you would wish them to be.
  - EliRivers 12y ago
    Real people are eating too much rice. This problem can be addressed by eating less rice.
    - mod 12y ago
      (Many) Real people are not good at controlling themselves and eating less volume of food. This problem can be addressed by eating food with fewer calories by volume.
      - EliRivers 12y ago
        This problem can be addressed by eating food with fewer calories by volume. They can already do that. There already exists high-volume , low-calorie food. The target market here is clearly not the people making that choice. I genuinely have trouble caring about people whose problems are caused by making the active choice to keep putting food in the hole in the front of their head. Unpopular view, I expect, but true. Absolutely a self-inflicted injury, and making less nutritious food to indulge these people is sickening, and frankly insulting to them. They've made their choice. Yeah, sure, maybe it IS a medical condition, and there is something massively wrong with these people's brain chemistry that means they're physically incapable of telling when they're not hungry, and they're too stupid to realise that eating five kilos of rice every day and being horrifically overweight is a clue that they're doing something wrong, or maybe they're masively emotionally damaged and stuck in some kind of self-loathing spiral that makes them eat more and more in some kind of slow suicide, but deliberately making food less nutritious is grotesque, and indulging these people in entirely the wrong way. I suspect that they'll simply eat twice as much of this new half-calorie rice, or just top it up with a big loaf of bread.
- deeviant 12y ago
  What amazingly useful logic. Why didn't somebody think of that before. We can employ in all sorts of use cases: * Solve global hunger problems? Give starving people more food. * End crime? Just everybody stop committing crimes. * Debilitating OCD? Just stop washing your hands.
- delg 12y ago
  You saw the part where part of the obesity problem is actually in the developing world right
orky56 12y ago
A lot of people still struggle with portion control and this method will give hope to many people. Calorie-dense foods psychologically bring us comfort so this will allow people to continue to eat them while still cutting calories. In the end, this translates to real weight loss assuming people don't pile on the calories elsewhere.
- npsimons 12y ago
  Calorie-dense foods psychologically bring us comfort Am I the only one disturbed by this statement? Sure, many people are conditioned to get emotional comfort from eating, but I've seen no evidence it's hard wired. I'm not saying one should hate food, but I find it as unhealthy to have a relationship with food where you use it to fill an emotional void, and I suspect it's a major cause of obesity in places like America. If an obese person lost their emotional attachment to food and stopped eating unconsciously, I'd be surprised if they didn't drop to a healthy weight.
  - VLM 12y ago
    Some google work indicates the "comfort food" meme of people are comforted by extremely high carb mostly starchy foods was invented in 1977. Its been a popular meme and has already settled into eternal common knowledge despite being less than 40 years old. None the less the concept is going to seem weird to people roughly older than the meme and self evident to everyone younger.
  - devindotcom 12y ago
    If an obese person lost their emotional attachment to food and stopped eating unconsciously, I'd be surprised if they didn't drop to a healthy weight. There's much, much, much more to it than this.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - pauloday 12y ago
    A big part of it is the supersaturated foods we have now are far, far more sweet/salty/fatty than our tastebuds evolved with. Sugar fat and salt taste good to us because our body needs them and in ancient times the tastiest foods available were also the healthiest (fruits, nuts, meat, etc). Evolutionarily speaking, food tastes good to encourage us to eat it, and it makes us happy to eat good food because that means we're keeping our bodies alive/healthy. Nowadays, we can make food that has far more sugar/fat/salt than our tastebuds evolved with, so the tastiest foods are now the worse foods for us, but the biological pressure to eat them hasn't gone away. To make it even worse, things that make us feel good are things we can get in the habit of doing (i.e. addicted) very easily. To make it even worse, you have to eat. If you're addicted to marijuana (assuming it's purely psychological addiction here) you don't have to smoke a less fulfilling joint every day (reminding you of the more fulfilling joint you could be smoking), you can just quit cold turkey (which is also hard but less so). A lot of obese people are literally addicted to unhealthy food since it provides so much more stimulus than our brains were evolved to handle. And to make it even worse, being obese tends to lead to low self-esteem and a common way to assuage self-esteem issues is to engage in pleasurable activity... like eating more unhealthy food. It's a vicious cycle of eating poorly, getting fat, then eating poorly to comfort oneself, getting fatter, eating more, etc. It can be very difficult to break the cycle, both because of the super-stimulatory nature of the food and because it's impossible to just quit eating cold turkey. Every healthy meal is a reminder of the addiction you could be feeding and with the high availability of poor food (especially in the US), it's even harder to stay healthy. In short, we are of wired to find bad food comforting in a roundabout way, and the problem is far harder than you give it credit for.
petemill 12y ago
'Wait 12 hours' might sound simple, but it's not very practical...
- zdean 12y ago
  This is especially true in Asian cultures where (as cited) rice is such a central part of the cuisine. The way that foods are prepared are tied often to tradition, family history, etc. Shifting even small habits is a huge undertaking: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/an-iron-fish-in-every-pot/355742/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/an-iron-...
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > 'Wait 12 hours' might sound simple, but it's not very practical... Its quite practical in a place where refrigerators are available. I suspect many of the places where rice is a staple food and transition from bare subsistence to a more robust living standard in a historically short period of time has resulted in an upswing of obesity as eating habits adapted to up and down cycles don't work as well with stronger and longer up cycles probably see a substantial overlap between the population this would hope to serve and the population for which refrigerating prepared food for 12 hours before consuming isn't a completely unrealistic prep step, even if its not something you'd do at home every meal. And even to the extent it is, part of what they've said is that they are looking into how this could be developed into a pre-consumer process.
- peterwwillis 12y ago
  It works well with rice cookers with delay timers (which are as cheap as $35). You prepare the rice the night before and put it in the rice cooker, then set the delay timer to right before you wake up. Once you wake up, put the cooked rice into a container and into the fridge; when you return home it's done. You can cycle this process every 12 hours by having new rice on a delay when you leave for work, so it's cooked when you return home and you can put that in the fridge for the morning or lunch. It may not be 12 hours exactly but it's close. Or just save big batches.
npsimons 12y ago
Or, you could, I don't know, just not each as much . . .
- buckbova 12y ago
  What if you are making a rice based dessert and wanted a lower calorie ingredient but not take away from the taste or texture? Problem solved.
  - npsimons 12y ago
    Eat less of the dessert; savor each bite. People who inhale a whole pint of ice cream in less than 10 minutes are the problem, and no amount of lo-cal will help them; they'll just eat more. For a large number of obese, it's not about being full, it's about eating to distraction, or eating unconsciously, or to fill an emotional need.
    - buckbova 12y ago
      So if I'm making a rice dessert dish for a party, that's typically served cold anyway, I should make no attempt to make it healthier? Instead I should tell everyone not to eat (much of) it? If there's no change in flavor or texture, this preparation seems like a win win.
anigbrowl 12y ago
"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," I've never met anyone who cooks rice by boiling the water first. Maybe it's an Indian thing, but all the people who've ever shown me 'the right way' to make rice in SE Asian cooking, stretching from Japan to Vietnam, rinse the rice a few times and then cook it from cold. The 'trick' for good rice is using the right amount of water and adjusting the heat to a low simmer when it boils. My (Asian) wife adds that she's heard of it but 'we thought that's how white people like rice.' ¯\(°_o)/¯ "After it was ready, we let it cool in the refrigerator for about 12 hours. That's it." Again, who eats their rice ice-cold unless they got take out the previous evening? Rice isn't that nice cold, nor is it absorbent enough to mop up sauces with, which is sort of a key thing in most Asian cuisine because it's always consumed as an accompaniment to something else, no matter how basic.
- beachstartup 12y ago
  the article says the effect remains after you re-heat the rice. since cooking rice takes time, lots of people cook large batches of rice and store it in the fridge for a few days. if basically all that's involved is adding some fat to the rice while it cooks, it's an easy change.
- rjbwork 12y ago
  White people (at least some) cook rice by rinsing once, throwing in rice cooker w/ water ( about 2 part water to 1 part rice), and then turning on the rice cooker. Source: Am white person. (from southeast Louisiana if it matters)
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    I'm also not Asian, but I no longer rinse at all. I see the point for sushi, but I have yet to discern the difference for any other application. I'll use a cooker if it's handy, but I don't mind a pot on the stove, and I always just eyeball the water. Believe me, I've already heard all the objections to my rice habits. b^)
- 12y ago
tremendo 12y ago
They're basically turning it into resistant starch. Calorie reduction is probably the lesser benefit of it. Resistant starch feeds the comensal bacteria in the gut. This is "good" bacteria. Or think of these resitant starches as the pre-biotic to your pro-biotics (the food for your bacteria friends). Rice is normally not the best for turning to resistant starch I believe, the process works a lot better for potatoes: cook, then chill, voilá. Even re-heating preserves some of the benefits. Not sure if, or how, the added coconut oil mentioned in the article would alter the process, or make it more effective.
- will_work4tears 12y ago
  I've read though, that that same bacteria produces short chain fatty acids with some non-trivial amount of calories. Also, where is this coconut oil they are putting in going when they cool it? Wouldn't the fat from the coconut oil counterbalance the savings by utilizing this method? That said, I'd rather have the short chain fatty acids than the excess carbs, so it seems a fair trade off to me.
  - odiroot 12y ago
    I'm not sure if you get anything (nutritious) back from the bacteria but from coconut oil you go medium-chain way which as far as I remember means pure ketones.
    - will_work4tears 12y ago
      Soluble fiber which is fermented by certain gut bacteria[0][1] and product short chain fatty acids (2.5-4 kcal per gram). Those SCFA has a slew of health benefits which the article kind of alludes to but doesn't name. [0]- http://www.precisionnutrition.com/all-about-resistant-starch http://www.precisionnutrition.com/all-about-resistant-starch [1]-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16633129 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16633129
  - CuriouslyC 12y ago
    Short chain fatty acids have a whole host of benefits. In particular, they have anti-inflammatory effects, they improve amino acid and mineral uptake, they improve insulin sensitivity and blood lipid regulation, the list goes on.
odiroot 12y ago
It would be great if it really worked as advertised. You could easily make low-carb sushi.
hashberry 12y ago
Here is the Abstract from the actual study: Obesity is an emerging health crisis in many developing countries. To find food based solutions for obesity, rice resistant starch (RS) concentrations and novel ways to increase RS concentrations were studied. A total of 38 Sri Lankan rice varieties were tested; the RS concentrations ranged from 0.30 to 4.65%. The traditional rice varieties had significantly higher RS concentrations than old and improved varieties. Bg 305 had the least RS concentration out of all. However, applying different heating and cooling conditions with pure coconut oil showed RS concentrations increased by at least 10 times. The increase in RS content could be attributed to the increase in RS3 and RS5 types, suggesting potential to increase these types of RS in rice. This study results clearly show that rice, when cooked properly, could be a good low calorie food source for obesity reduction. In-vivo glycemic effects of RS studies are in progress. http://phys.org/news/2015-03-low-calorie-rice-obesity.html http://phys.org/news/2015-03-low-calorie-rice-obesity.html
wyc 12y ago
On the topic of changing how foods affect us via preparation, this (somewhat click-baity) article talks about how refrigeration of cooked pasta could reduce glucose spikes from its consumption: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29629761 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29629761 Both articles sound borderline one-weird-trick to me, but the explanations are plausible.
crazygringo 12y ago
Or you could just eat half as much rice? Plus, eating half as much works with all foods, not just rice! :)
- CardenB 12y ago
  But then you are twice as hungry
PerfectElement 12y ago
> China and India, which are already seeing rising obesity problems, are huge consumers of rice. Are there any studies linking rice consumption to higher obesity rates? AFAIK, these populations have relied on rice for ages and their obesity rates have only spiked recently.
oswego 12y ago
I can't find details on their process, but I wonder if they bothered to compare their results to hot water washing the rice prior to putting it into the boil water. I do this every time and I notice a mega amount of starch is taken away. It would be rather sad if they didn't account for this.
- Vraxx 12y ago
  I don't know for certain whether or not they accounted for it, but I'm inclined to believe that your suggestion isn't the contributing factor to the reduced calories. I've read about this effect before, except with reheated pasta instead of rice (both seem rather similar to me) and the pasta was due to the resistant starches as well. This is the article that I read it in before [0]. [0]:http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29629761 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29629761
jrapdx3 12y ago
This article provokes more questions than it answers. While I got the general idea about creating more Resistant Starch, the details about the transformation from digestible to resistant is kind of murky. Perhaps seeing the data in the source publication would make it clearer but the full report isn't readily available. Furthermore, the effects and benefits of the cooking method are also unclear. Obesity is no doubt the most complex problem in all medical science to unravel as every body system is implicated in its origin and continuation. Obesity treatment is extremely difficult because of the tremendous level of parallelism inherent in the processes of energy storage and utilization. For this research to be pragmatically significant, it needs to be convincingly shown that consuming this rice vs that rice matters, and that this single change produces a difference in adiposity. My experience as an obesity treatment specialist suggests it's unlikely that will happen. A problem resulting from thousands of contributing (and highly variable) factors is not going to be solved by altering some small subset of elements. Understanding the nature of the problem is a herculean task. But until a clearer picture emerges, all we will do is nibble at the edges.
adhammad88 12y ago
It is probably impossible to pick the best cookbook of all time, but I think the paleo recipe book is the best for me , Prepare easy and healthy meals with the Paleo Recipe Book. Over 370 recipes covering just about anything you'll ever need on a Paleo diet . for more info click the link : http://www.paleorecipebookview.com/ http://www.paleorecipebookview.com/

62 points by alexcasalboni 12y ago

If I'm going to eat rice, it's because of the carbs it has, so I'm fine with the amount of calories it has, but I see how it can be useful for certain people.

zdean 12y ago

There are people around the world starving because they don't have access to enough calories and we're trying to figure out how to reduce the caloric values of foods. At the same time we're coming up with stuff like Soylent because we're worried that we're using too much of our resources to produce foods. What a strange set of circumstances. Perhaps a less revolutionary idea to reduce the calories in the rice you eat by 50%: eat 50% less rice.

Splendor 12y ago
While simply eating less works for most people I think this is a little dismissive of other factors at work in the obesity epidemic.
- zdean 12y ago
  Such as food subsidies that make high calorie/low value foods cheaper than they otherwise would be? Or the over-availability to the most at-risk populations of these high calorie/low value foods? I'm not sure how lowering the caloric density of a food is going to lower the incentive to eating too much food. In fact, I could easily see it doing the opposite.
- dublinben 12y ago
  >eating less works for most people Eating less actually works for all people, it's just hard to commit to. Restricting calories is uncomfortable.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Eating less actually works for all people, it's just hard to commit to. If people are less able to comply with a program than an alternative program, then the first program, in fact, works less well (if it can even be said to work at all) for them. So the two halves of this statement are opposed.
    - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
      The problem is when some people claim that they just become overweight because of their genes, and are unable to lose weight by eating less. This is a stupid statement which is proven false by basic thermodynamics, and this should be pointed out. If you look at statistics from Europe at the end of WW2, or from the late 1930s in the US, how many obese people were there? Pretty much zero, because food was scarce.
      - jessaustin 12y ago
        I don't think your proposal to fight more wars to destroy the global economy and make food scarce will appeal to many people outside the armaments industry.
      - oldmanjay 12y ago
        Did you have a point or were you just posting to feel superior to strawman fat people?
        semi-extrinsic 12y ago
        I was replying to parent who was basically saying that a process does not work if people are unwilling to try the process. This statement is false. If I am unwilling to replace the broken on exhaust on my car, it does not mean that it's impossible for me to fix my car.
        npsimons 12y ago
        Exactly. You can't beat the second law of thermodynamics. I'm really disappointed in the level of fatlogic in the comments here, and the downvotes for pointing out simple facts.
- digikata 12y ago
  We are also living in a world economy which is constrained (among other factors) by energy inputs, water, and arable land. So a method of reducing calorie intake of a food after you've spent the resources to produce a crop seems... well, wasteful.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> There are people around the world starving because they don't have access to enough calories and we're trying to figure out how to reduce the caloric values of foods. We're also trying to figure out how to increase the nutritional values of foods that tend to be available to areas where inadequate food supplies are problematic (e.g., cassava.) Different groups of people have different, and often opposite, problems, and research can be directed at more than one of them at a time. > At the same time we're coming up with stuff like Soylent because we're worried that we're using too much of our resources to produce foods. I've yet to see any coherent explanation of how a heavily processed food like Soylent can be anything but an increase in the resources to produce food. Might, optimistically, reduce the resource cost to deliver and store food compared to some other alternatives. Mostly, though, its seems to be an attempt to make money by selling convenience to people with who aren't particularly concerned for other features of food (other than perhaps a certain very broad nutritional profile.) > Perhaps a less revolutionary idea to reduce the calories in the rice you eat by 50%: eat 50% less rice. A number of people find it much easier to reduce calories first (by eating less calorie-dense foods, but with similar volumes) and then reduce volumes (potentially adding back more calorie-dense foods in the process, or perhaps further reducing calories in the process.) You can address real people's problems more effectively when you deal with them being how they are rather than how you would wish them to be.
- EliRivers 12y ago
  Real people are eating too much rice. This problem can be addressed by eating less rice.
  - mod 12y ago
    (Many) Real people are not good at controlling themselves and eating less volume of food. This problem can be addressed by eating food with fewer calories by volume.
    - EliRivers 12y ago
      This problem can be addressed by eating food with fewer calories by volume. They can already do that. There already exists high-volume , low-calorie food. The target market here is clearly not the people making that choice. I genuinely have trouble caring about people whose problems are caused by making the active choice to keep putting food in the hole in the front of their head. Unpopular view, I expect, but true. Absolutely a self-inflicted injury, and making less nutritious food to indulge these people is sickening, and frankly insulting to them. They've made their choice. Yeah, sure, maybe it IS a medical condition, and there is something massively wrong with these people's brain chemistry that means they're physically incapable of telling when they're not hungry, and they're too stupid to realise that eating five kilos of rice every day and being horrifically overweight is a clue that they're doing something wrong, or maybe they're masively emotionally damaged and stuck in some kind of self-loathing spiral that makes them eat more and more in some kind of slow suicide, but deliberately making food less nutritious is grotesque, and indulging these people in entirely the wrong way. I suspect that they'll simply eat twice as much of this new half-calorie rice, or just top it up with a big loaf of bread.
deeviant 12y ago
What amazingly useful logic. Why didn't somebody think of that before. We can employ in all sorts of use cases: * Solve global hunger problems? Give starving people more food. * End crime? Just everybody stop committing crimes. * Debilitating OCD? Just stop washing your hands.
delg 12y ago
You saw the part where part of the obesity problem is actually in the developing world right

orky56 12y ago

A lot of people still struggle with portion control and this method will give hope to many people. Calorie-dense foods psychologically bring us comfort so this will allow people to continue to eat them while still cutting calories. In the end, this translates to real weight loss assuming people don't pile on the calories elsewhere.

npsimons 12y ago
Calorie-dense foods psychologically bring us comfort Am I the only one disturbed by this statement? Sure, many people are conditioned to get emotional comfort from eating, but I've seen no evidence it's hard wired. I'm not saying one should hate food, but I find it as unhealthy to have a relationship with food where you use it to fill an emotional void, and I suspect it's a major cause of obesity in places like America. If an obese person lost their emotional attachment to food and stopped eating unconsciously, I'd be surprised if they didn't drop to a healthy weight.
- VLM 12y ago
  Some google work indicates the "comfort food" meme of people are comforted by extremely high carb mostly starchy foods was invented in 1977. Its been a popular meme and has already settled into eternal common knowledge despite being less than 40 years old. None the less the concept is going to seem weird to people roughly older than the meme and self evident to everyone younger.
- devindotcom 12y ago
  If an obese person lost their emotional attachment to food and stopped eating unconsciously, I'd be surprised if they didn't drop to a healthy weight. There's much, much, much more to it than this.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- pauloday 12y ago
  A big part of it is the supersaturated foods we have now are far, far more sweet/salty/fatty than our tastebuds evolved with. Sugar fat and salt taste good to us because our body needs them and in ancient times the tastiest foods available were also the healthiest (fruits, nuts, meat, etc). Evolutionarily speaking, food tastes good to encourage us to eat it, and it makes us happy to eat good food because that means we're keeping our bodies alive/healthy. Nowadays, we can make food that has far more sugar/fat/salt than our tastebuds evolved with, so the tastiest foods are now the worse foods for us, but the biological pressure to eat them hasn't gone away. To make it even worse, things that make us feel good are things we can get in the habit of doing (i.e. addicted) very easily. To make it even worse, you have to eat. If you're addicted to marijuana (assuming it's purely psychological addiction here) you don't have to smoke a less fulfilling joint every day (reminding you of the more fulfilling joint you could be smoking), you can just quit cold turkey (which is also hard but less so). A lot of obese people are literally addicted to unhealthy food since it provides so much more stimulus than our brains were evolved to handle. And to make it even worse, being obese tends to lead to low self-esteem and a common way to assuage self-esteem issues is to engage in pleasurable activity... like eating more unhealthy food. It's a vicious cycle of eating poorly, getting fat, then eating poorly to comfort oneself, getting fatter, eating more, etc. It can be very difficult to break the cycle, both because of the super-stimulatory nature of the food and because it's impossible to just quit eating cold turkey. Every healthy meal is a reminder of the addiction you could be feeding and with the high availability of poor food (especially in the US), it's even harder to stay healthy. In short, we are of wired to find bad food comforting in a roundabout way, and the problem is far harder than you give it credit for.

petemill 12y ago

'Wait 12 hours' might sound simple, but it's not very practical...

zdean 12y ago
This is especially true in Asian cultures where (as cited) rice is such a central part of the cuisine. The way that foods are prepared are tied often to tradition, family history, etc. Shifting even small habits is a huge undertaking: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/an-iron-fish-in-every-pot/355742/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/an-iron-...
dragonwriter 12y ago
> 'Wait 12 hours' might sound simple, but it's not very practical... Its quite practical in a place where refrigerators are available. I suspect many of the places where rice is a staple food and transition from bare subsistence to a more robust living standard in a historically short period of time has resulted in an upswing of obesity as eating habits adapted to up and down cycles don't work as well with stronger and longer up cycles probably see a substantial overlap between the population this would hope to serve and the population for which refrigerating prepared food for 12 hours before consuming isn't a completely unrealistic prep step, even if its not something you'd do at home every meal. And even to the extent it is, part of what they've said is that they are looking into how this could be developed into a pre-consumer process.
peterwwillis 12y ago
It works well with rice cookers with delay timers (which are as cheap as $35). You prepare the rice the night before and put it in the rice cooker, then set the delay timer to right before you wake up. Once you wake up, put the cooked rice into a container and into the fridge; when you return home it's done. You can cycle this process every 12 hours by having new rice on a delay when you leave for work, so it's cooked when you return home and you can put that in the fridge for the morning or lunch. It may not be 12 hours exactly but it's close. Or just save big batches.

npsimons 12y ago

Or, you could, I don't know, just not each as much . . .

buckbova 12y ago
What if you are making a rice based dessert and wanted a lower calorie ingredient but not take away from the taste or texture? Problem solved.
- npsimons 12y ago
  Eat less of the dessert; savor each bite. People who inhale a whole pint of ice cream in less than 10 minutes are the problem, and no amount of lo-cal will help them; they'll just eat more. For a large number of obese, it's not about being full, it's about eating to distraction, or eating unconsciously, or to fill an emotional need.
  - buckbova 12y ago
    So if I'm making a rice dessert dish for a party, that's typically served cold anyway, I should make no attempt to make it healthier? Instead I should tell everyone not to eat (much of) it? If there's no change in flavor or texture, this preparation seems like a win win.

anigbrowl 12y ago

"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," I've never met anyone who cooks rice by boiling the water first. Maybe it's an Indian thing, but all the people who've ever shown me 'the right way' to make rice in SE Asian cooking, stretching from Japan to Vietnam, rinse the rice a few times and then cook it from cold. The 'trick' for good rice is using the right amount of water and adjusting the heat to a low simmer when it boils. My (Asian) wife adds that she's heard of it but 'we thought that's how white people like rice.' ¯\(°_o)/¯ "After it was ready, we let it cool in the refrigerator for about 12 hours. That's it." Again, who eats their rice ice-cold unless they got take out the previous evening? Rice isn't that nice cold, nor is it absorbent enough to mop up sauces with, which is sort of a key thing in most Asian cuisine because it's always consumed as an accompaniment to something else, no matter how basic.

beachstartup 12y ago
the article says the effect remains after you re-heat the rice. since cooking rice takes time, lots of people cook large batches of rice and store it in the fridge for a few days. if basically all that's involved is adding some fat to the rice while it cooks, it's an easy change.
rjbwork 12y ago
White people (at least some) cook rice by rinsing once, throwing in rice cooker w/ water ( about 2 part water to 1 part rice), and then turning on the rice cooker. Source: Am white person. (from southeast Louisiana if it matters)
- jessaustin 12y ago
  I'm also not Asian, but I no longer rinse at all. I see the point for sushi, but I have yet to discern the difference for any other application. I'll use a cooker if it's handy, but I don't mind a pot on the stove, and I always just eyeball the water. Believe me, I've already heard all the objections to my rice habits. b^)
12y ago

tremendo 12y ago

They're basically turning it into resistant starch. Calorie reduction is probably the lesser benefit of it. Resistant starch feeds the comensal bacteria in the gut. This is "good" bacteria. Or think of these resitant starches as the pre-biotic to your pro-biotics (the food for your bacteria friends). Rice is normally not the best for turning to resistant starch I believe, the process works a lot better for potatoes: cook, then chill, voilá. Even re-heating preserves some of the benefits. Not sure if, or how, the added coconut oil mentioned in the article would alter the process, or make it more effective.

will_work4tears 12y ago
I've read though, that that same bacteria produces short chain fatty acids with some non-trivial amount of calories. Also, where is this coconut oil they are putting in going when they cool it? Wouldn't the fat from the coconut oil counterbalance the savings by utilizing this method? That said, I'd rather have the short chain fatty acids than the excess carbs, so it seems a fair trade off to me.
- odiroot 12y ago
  I'm not sure if you get anything (nutritious) back from the bacteria but from coconut oil you go medium-chain way which as far as I remember means pure ketones.
  - will_work4tears 12y ago
    Soluble fiber which is fermented by certain gut bacteria[0][1] and product short chain fatty acids (2.5-4 kcal per gram). Those SCFA has a slew of health benefits which the article kind of alludes to but doesn't name. [0]- http://www.precisionnutrition.com/all-about-resistant-starch http://www.precisionnutrition.com/all-about-resistant-starch [1]-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16633129 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16633129
- CuriouslyC 12y ago
  Short chain fatty acids have a whole host of benefits. In particular, they have anti-inflammatory effects, they improve amino acid and mineral uptake, they improve insulin sensitivity and blood lipid regulation, the list goes on.

odiroot 12y ago

It would be great if it really worked as advertised. You could easily make low-carb sushi.

hashberry 12y ago

Here is the Abstract from the actual study: Obesity is an emerging health crisis in many developing countries. To find food based solutions for obesity, rice resistant starch (RS) concentrations and novel ways to increase RS concentrations were studied. A total of 38 Sri Lankan rice varieties were tested; the RS concentrations ranged from 0.30 to 4.65%. The traditional rice varieties had significantly higher RS concentrations than old and improved varieties. Bg 305 had the least RS concentration out of all. However, applying different heating and cooling conditions with pure coconut oil showed RS concentrations increased by at least 10 times. The increase in RS content could be attributed to the increase in RS3 and RS5 types, suggesting potential to increase these types of RS in rice. This study results clearly show that rice, when cooked properly, could be a good low calorie food source for obesity reduction. In-vivo glycemic effects of RS studies are in progress. http://phys.org/news/2015-03-low-calorie-rice-obesity.html http://phys.org/news/2015-03-low-calorie-rice-obesity.html

wyc 12y ago

On the topic of changing how foods affect us via preparation, this (somewhat click-baity) article talks about how refrigeration of cooked pasta could reduce glucose spikes from its consumption: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29629761 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29629761 Both articles sound borderline one-weird-trick to me, but the explanations are plausible.

crazygringo 12y ago

Or you could just eat half as much rice? Plus, eating half as much works with all foods, not just rice! :)

CardenB 12y ago
But then you are twice as hungry

PerfectElement 12y ago

> China and India, which are already seeing rising obesity problems, are huge consumers of rice. Are there any studies linking rice consumption to higher obesity rates? AFAIK, these populations have relied on rice for ages and their obesity rates have only spiked recently.

oswego 12y ago

I can't find details on their process, but I wonder if they bothered to compare their results to hot water washing the rice prior to putting it into the boil water. I do this every time and I notice a mega amount of starch is taken away. It would be rather sad if they didn't account for this.

Vraxx 12y ago
I don't know for certain whether or not they accounted for it, but I'm inclined to believe that your suggestion isn't the contributing factor to the reduced calories. I've read about this effect before, except with reheated pasta instead of rice (both seem rather similar to me) and the pasta was due to the resistant starches as well. This is the article that I read it in before [0]. [0]:http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29629761 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29629761

jrapdx3 12y ago

This article provokes more questions than it answers. While I got the general idea about creating more Resistant Starch, the details about the transformation from digestible to resistant is kind of murky. Perhaps seeing the data in the source publication would make it clearer but the full report isn't readily available. Furthermore, the effects and benefits of the cooking method are also unclear. Obesity is no doubt the most complex problem in all medical science to unravel as every body system is implicated in its origin and continuation. Obesity treatment is extremely difficult because of the tremendous level of parallelism inherent in the processes of energy storage and utilization. For this research to be pragmatically significant, it needs to be convincingly shown that consuming this rice vs that rice matters, and that this single change produces a difference in adiposity. My experience as an obesity treatment specialist suggests it's unlikely that will happen. A problem resulting from thousands of contributing (and highly variable) factors is not going to be solved by altering some small subset of elements. Understanding the nature of the problem is a herculean task. But until a clearer picture emerges, all we will do is nibble at the edges.

adhammad88 12y ago

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