Scientists at the College of Chemical Sciences in Sri Lanka have developed a recipe for rice that greatly reduces the amount of digestible calories.  Rice is the most-widely consumed source of calories in the world, and in many cuisines, it is consumed with every meal of the deal.  The problem, however, is that as rice has gotten cheaper to produce but not any healthier to consume: a single cup of the cooked grain has about 200 calories–mostly in starch form.  These starches convert to fat in the body when not burned off shortly after consumption.

Thus, the interest in slowly-digestible and resistant starches is growing, and that’s where undergraduate student Sudhair James’ research comes in.  “If you can reduce the digestible starch in something like steamed rice, you can reduce the calories,” said Dr. Pushparajah Thavarajah, a professor who is supervising the research. “The impact could be huge.”  Rice is usually converted into glucose in the gut, and then glycogen soon after.  This glycogen builds up when we don’t exercise enough to expend the energy consumed.  However, some “resistant” starches take too long for the body to process into glucose or glycogen, so we don’t process as many calories.

The Sri Lanka team has developed a recipe that converts regular white rice into a starch more similar to a resistant starch: “What we did is cook the rice as you normally do, but when the water is boiling, before adding the raw rice, we added coconut oil—about 3 percent of the weight of the rice you’re going to cook,” said Sudhair James, who presented his preliminary research at National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) on Monday. “After it was ready, we let it cool in the refrigerator for about 12 hours. That’s it.”

To read more about the research, click here.