A cup of white rice has about 200 energy—not insignificant, contemplating it’s most frequently used as a small half of a bigger dish. However there’s a simple, pure technique to make rice much less caloric: add a little bit fats, then let it cool. In keeping with analysis offered on the American Chemical Society’s nationwide assembly, utilizing coconut oil and a fridge can slash energy by as a lot as 60%.
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Reading: One cup of rice is how many calories
Rice is made up of digestible starch and a particular kind of carbohydrate referred to as resistant starch, which current analysis suggests could also be key for weight management. People don’t have the enzymes to digest resistant starch, so it isn’t reworked into sugar and absorbed rapidly within the bloodstream like digestible starch. As a substitute, it bypasses the small gut and is metabolized within the colon, the place it’s fermented into short-chain fatty acids that feed wholesome colonies of intestine micro organism. The extra resistant starch a meals has, the less energy from that starch our our bodies will take in. Resistant starch is plentiful in meals like legumes, beans, complete grains, raw potatoes and unripe bananas.
Researchers from the School of Chemical Sciences in Sri Lanka wished to determine if they might convert a few of rice’s digestible starch into the non-digestible kind, and thereby make it much less caloric. By testing out 38 totally different sorts of rice and simulating human digestion in a check tube, they devised a recipe for the least caloric technique to prepare dinner rice: drop a teaspoon of coconut oil into boiling water, then add half a cup of non-fortified white rice and prepare dinner it for about 40 minutes. After cooking, stick it within the fridge for 12 hours.
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Rice cooked this fashion had a minimum of 10 occasions the resistant starch as usually ready rice and 10-15% fewer energy. However researchers assume that with sure sorts of rice, the strategy might reduce energy by 50-60%.
Right here’s the way it works: the glucose models in scorching cooked rice have a unfastened construction, however when it cools down, the molecules rearrange themselves into very tight bonds which are extra immune to digestion, says Pushaparaja Thavarajah, PhD, who supervised the examine. Scientists already know that it really works in potatoes, however within the new examine, researchers thought that including a fats like coconut oil might add additional safety. It appeared to. The fats molecule wedges its means into the rice, Thavarajah says, and supplies a barrier in opposition to fast digestion.
Making rice starch extra resistant has different perks in addition to reducing energy. It’ll additionally feed your good micro organism. “The resistant starch is a very good substrate, or energy source, for the bacteria inside the human gut,” says Thavarajah.
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Better of all, the researchers discovered that reheating the rice didn’t change the degrees of resistant starch—so the calorie hack is secure for leftovers, too.
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Write to Mandy Oaklander at mandy.oaklander@time.com.
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