Rice Cooked To Produce 60% Less Calories

An article regarding cooking rice so it has 60% less calories.

I am rather suspicious of such claims. Yes it is possible to reduce available food value by the way you cook things but I have doubts about such large reductions. I spent a few minutes trying to find the origin of this material and didn’t get anything by the stated author Sudhair James, others may do better.

This article gives some additional information, to summarise:

  • James only demonstrated much smaller effects (10-12%) but said greater effects could be possible.
  • It wasn’t published in a peer-reviewed journal.
  • The rice has to be cooked for 40 minutes and then cooled overnight, although it can be reheated, which (to me) is neither convenient nor likely to produce an attractive texture.
  • The article concludes you would be better off just eating less.

My take on it is that there may also be unintended side effects. The core of the process is to make some of the starch immune to our digestive enzymes. Quite a few kinds of starch naturally have this property. So when eaten they pass down the gut undigested to a region where our gut flora does have the ability to digest them. A common result is copious gas. This may produce effects ranging from great discomfort to mere embarrassment.

My conclusion is, interesting idea but needs more work to be actually useful.

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