Rice. Our addiction to the carb is almost as compulsive as a panda’s love of bamboo shoots. And in the AUGUSTMAN team, we generally rate carbs on the same level as striking lottery in terms of the amount of joy it brings us.
But there’s constant debate on its value in consumption. Brown rice, which is basically unmilled rice, offers lots more nutrients but also contains more phytic acid which can be difficult for some to (pardon the pun) stomach. White rice is essentially gluten-free and low in phytic acid, but also sheds all the added nutrients of brown rice when it’s unshelled.
Brown or white?
Then there’s the debate of starch quality. White rice contains plenty of resistant starch, which is essentially good starch because it’s not digested by the body, so it passes through the colon and acts as a soluble fibre, and it’s consumed by the good bacteria in your gut, so it’s good for people with blood sugar issues. Brown rice has plenty of resistant starch as well along with being probiotic, but contains gluten.
As starchy fruits like bananas ripen fully, resistant starch is converted to regular starch.
Resistant starch can convert into regular starch, which is quickly digested, affects blood sugar levels and adds to your waistline. It’s what food nutritionists call retrogradation. For example, when bananas are green, they have higher resistant starch, and as they ripen more, the starch converts to regular starch. But there’s a way to reverse the process, and in fact convert regular starch to resistant starch.
There’s nothing coconut oil cannot fix.
It’s a really simple hack, in fact. Instead of eating rice hot and right after it’s cooked, simply add coconut oil to the rice and water (around 3% of the amount of rice you’re cooking in weight, around 1 teaspoon per half cup) and let it cool (refrigerate if you like). Coconut oil binds with regular starch and when cooled, converts it to resistant starch. That means more healthy soluble fibre and less calories for the same amount of rice you eat.
Tests have shown that even if you heat the rice after cooling, the resistant starch remains constant in value. You can have your rice and eat it. Just cook it for tomorrow. The study also showed that fried rice contains more resistant starch than regular cooked white rice sans coconut oil.