Hi everyone I'm Monica Reinagle and you're listening to the nutrition

Divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

The American Chemical fabulous.

The American Chemical Society held their annual meeting last month. Although I'm sure this meeting is very exciting for chemists,

the proceedings rarely dominate the new cycle.

This year, however, was different.

A couple of scientists from Sri Lanka announced that they discovered a new method for cooking rice

that could reduce calories by up to 60%.

You would have thought they put men on Mars.

Now as usual, the headlines have gotten a little ahead of the science. So far, the scientists have only managed to reduce

calories in rice by 10 to 15 percent. However, they speculate that using the same technique on other varieties of rice could eventually reduce calories by 50 to 60 percent.

This has not yet been demonstrated. There's also a very important safety concern that anyone attempting to replicate this effect at home needs to know about.

This story is really about resistant starch, something I've talked about in previous nutrition diva episodes.

As we already knew, cooking and cooling starchy foods like rice, pasta, and potatoes

converts more of the starches that they contain into a type of starch that's resistant to digestion,

and reheating does not undo this effect.

Resistant starch acts more like fiber than starch.

It passes through the digestive system largely undigested, thereby reducing the amount of calories

that are absorbed.

Resistance starch also acts as a prebiotic, which means that it absorbed. This latest discovery is that adding a bit of coconut oil to the cooking water seems to further enhance the formation of resistant starch when the cooked rice is cooled.

Now more research is going to be needed to determine whether there's something special about coconut oil or whether another type of oil would work just as well.

I predict that other kinds of oil will produce similar effects.

...