Scientists have found a new way of cooking rice while cutting its calorie content of up to 60%. The new process of cooking rice involves adding coconut oil to it, placing it in the fridge and cooling it down with a microwave afterwards.
“The hypothesis is that we turn more of the starch into an indigestible form of starch, which reduces the amount of calories the body will absorb,”Dr. Pushparajah Thavarajva told ABC news, he is the researcher from the College of Chemical Sciences in Sri Lanka who supervised the study.
For the study, the researchers tested one of the 38 varieties of Sri Lankan rice which has the lowest amount of naturally occurring starch resistant to digestion.
According to Sudhair James, a graduate student who exhibited the preliminary research earlier this week at National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society in Denver, they obtain the best result of cooking low caloric rice after adding coconut oil to it then cooling it down.
“The beautiful piece is there was a fifteen-fold increase in the amount of resistant starch after using this method,” James added. “This led to a 10 to 15 percent calorie reduction.”
In his explanation, Thavarajva said that the starch molecules look like doughnuts and that when oil is absorbed into the holes of the molecules during cooking, it helps block the digestive enzymes.
The researchers are optimistic that further studies will help in developing their idea into something that can fight obesity and diabetes.
“We as scientists believe that if we are going to do this process on the best varieties and if this method is going to work this could be a massive breakthrough,” James said. “We could lower the calories in rice by 50 to 60 percent.”
The researchers warned though that this method might not work for all types of rice.
Source: The American Register
