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Low-calorie options are never what they seem. In general, sacrificing calories almost always means adding sugar, sodium, or chemicals you can’t actually pronounce out loud.
So when we heard the news that scientists have come up with a new way to cut the calories in rice by up to 50 percent, it was pretty difficult not to be skeptical at first.
But it’s true! Researchers from the College Of Chemical Sciences in Sri Lanka have actually figured out a scientific way to change the chemical makeup of rice that dramatically cuts the calories.
Here’s how you can try it at home:
- Boil 2 cups of water and set 1 cup of rice aside.
- Add coconut oil—about 3% of the weight of the rice you’re going to cook.
- Pour in the cup of rice and cook it as you normally would.
- Immediately transfer the rice to a container and refrigerate for 12 hours.
- Reheat the chilled rice.
It may seem like a strange concept, but this ingenious trick really does work as long as you follow the instructions exactly.
To understand how this method cuts calories, we have to talk about starches first:
There are two types of starches in our favorite carbs: digestible starches, which digest in the body very quickly, and resistant starches, which take longer to process.
Digestible starches are what we have to look out for, because they’re rapidly turned into glycogen—where we get our energy from—which typically gets turned into fat.
So the key to this trick is converting rice, mostly a digestible starch, into a more resistant starch that your body won’t immediately use to store its calories as fat.
How does this work?
According to researchers, allowing the rice and coconut oil time to interact actually changes the composition of the rice. Chilling the rice after speeds up the process of converting the digestible starch into a more resistant starch—even when you reheat it the next day.
And keep in mind that this trick works best on healthy rice—brown, multi-grain, etc.—but you can still try it with white rice.
