Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that cuts the calories • Hacker News Board

Re: Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that cuts the calories

#61

Post by pauloday » Wed, Mar 25, 2015, 8:52 PM UTC

npsimons wrote: post #21

orky56 wrote: post #4

A lot of people still struggle with portion control and this method will give hope to many people. Calorie-dense foods psychologically bring us comfort so this will allow people to continue to eat them while still cutting calories. In the end, this translates to real weight loss assuming people don't pile on the calories elsewhere.

Calorie-dense foods psychologically bring us comfort Am I the only one disturbed by this statement? Sure, many people are conditioned to get emotional comfort from eating, but I've seen no evidence it's hard wired. I'm not saying one should hate food, but I find it as unhealthy to have a relationship with food where you use it to fill an emotional void, and I suspect it's a major cause of obesity in places like Ameri…

A big part of it is the supersaturated foods we have now are far, far more sweet/salty/fatty than our tastebuds evolved with. Sugar fat and salt taste good to us because our body needs them and in ancient times the tastiest foods available were also the healthiest (fruits, nuts, meat, etc). Evolutionarily speaking, food tastes good to encourage us to eat it, and it makes us happy to eat good food because that means we're keeping our bodies alive/healthy. Nowadays, we can make food that has far more sugar/fat/salt than our tastebuds evolved with, so the tastiest foods are now the worse foods for us, but the biological pressure to eat them hasn't gone away.

To make it even worse, things that make us feel good are things we can get in the habit of doing (i.e. addicted) very easily. To make it even worse, you have to eat. If you're addicted to marijuana (assuming it's purely psychological addiction here) you don't have to smoke a less fulfilling joint every day (reminding you of the more fulfilling joint you could be smoking), you can just quit cold turkey (which is also hard but less so). A lot of obese people are literally addicted to unhealthy food since it provides so much more stimulus than our brains were evolved to handle.

And to make it even worse, being obese tends to lead to low self-esteem and a common way to assuage self-esteem issues is to engage in pleasurable activity... like eating more unhealthy food. It's a vicious cycle of eating poorly, getting fat, then eating poorly to comfort oneself, getting fatter, eating more, etc. It can be very difficult to break the cycle, both because of the super-stimulatory nature of the food and because it's impossible to just quit eating cold turkey. Every healthy meal is a reminder of the addiction you could be feeding and with the high availability of poor food (especially in the US), it's even harder to stay healthy.

In short, we are of wired to find bad food comforting in a roundabout way, and the problem is far harder than you give it credit for.

Re: Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that cuts the calories

#62

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Mar 25, 2015, 9:11 PM UTC

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #25

dragonwriter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eating less actually works for all people, it's just hard to commit to. If people are less able to comply with a program than an alternative program, then the first program, in fact, works less well (if it can even be said to work at all) for them. So the two halves of this statement are opposed.

The problem is when some people claim that they just become overweight because of their genes, and are unable to lose weight by eating less. This is a stupid statement which is proven false by basic thermodynamics, and this should be pointed out. If you look at statistics from Europe at the end of WW2, or from the late 1930s in the US, how many obese people were there? Pretty much zero, because food was scarce.

> The problem is when some people claim that they just become overweight because of their genes, and are unable to lose weight by eating less.

Without getting into the discussion of whether or not your problem is simply equivocation because you are interpreting "unable" in a different sense than those using it (or, e.g., the medical community) would in this context, "eating less" in the context of this discussion was eating less volume of food with the same calorie density, and the post to which you responded was pointing out that that is, in practice, not as successful for some people as eating similar volumes of food with lower calorie content.

Both of these methods are equally "eating less" in a caloric balance sense. The set of processes that affect processes related to wait loss (including both processes that control how much of that energy content is actually made available, and processes that might be viewed as compliance-related in terms of satiety triggers on the input side and processes that make people prone or resistant to activity on the output side) have substantial, well-known, biological variation between individuals, which have significant linkages to propensity for obesity.

Treating the issue one of simply calories in vs. calories out with success outcomes differentiated only by moral features like willpower is a stupid statement which is proven false by a vast body of research on metabolism, obesity, etc.

Re: Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that cuts the calories

#63

Post by npsimons » Wed, Mar 25, 2015, 9:43 PM UTC

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #38

EliRivers wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real people are eating too much rice. This problem can be addressed by eating less rice.

This is like pushing abstinence education to end teen pregnancy.

Actually, it's like saying "you can have sex, just wear a condom and don't have sex with every person that asks; use a little self-control."

Re: Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that cuts the calories

#64

Post by npsimons » Wed, Mar 25, 2015, 9:45 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #13

dublinben wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>eating less works for most people Eating less actually works for all people, it's just hard to commit to. Restricting calories is uncomfortable.

I had a professor in college whose field of expertise was designing cockpits. She liked to say that if the pilot pushes the wrong button and crashes the plane, it's your fault as the cockpit designer that it was possible to make that mistake.

I like to say if a pilot (person) starts firing bullets into the engines (eats too much) and crashes the plane (suffers the effects of ill health), then it's probably the pilot's fault for thinking the laws of physics don't apply to them. Unfortunately, our bodies aren't designed, and while they evolved many failsafes, it takes some conscious control not to mess them up.

Re: Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that cuts the calories

#65

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Mar 25, 2015, 9:52 PM UTC

ineedtosleep wrote: post #31

anigbrowl wrote: post #16

"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," I've never met anyone who cooks rice by boiling the water first. Maybe it's an Indian thing, but all the people who've ever shown me 'the right way' to make rice in SE Asian cooking, stretching from Japan to Vietnam, rinse th…

I've always joked around about Asians rinsing their rice: "The world would save so much fresh water if Asians only rinsed their water once." My mom would usually get mad at me since I usually rinse 1-2 times when she does around 4 rinses. Then I asked a friend who worked at a fine dining sushi/sashimi place how much they wash their rice. Minimum 6 washes. I guess it's not much of a joke anymore.

Well, any time I make rice the water goes in a basin and ends up back int he garden a few minutes later, so I don't feel guilty about that.

Re: Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that cuts the calories

#66

Post by delg » Wed, Mar 25, 2015, 10:12 PM UTC

npsimons wrote: post #64

rayiner wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a professor in college whose field of expertise was designing cockpits. She liked to say that if the pilot pushes the wrong button and crashes the plane, it's your fault as the cockpit designer that it was possible to make that mistake.

I like to say if a pilot (person) starts firing bullets into the engines (eats too much) and crashes the plane (suffers the effects of ill health), then it's probably the pilot's fault for thinking the laws of physics don't apply to them. Unfortunately, our bodies aren't designed, and while they evolved many failsafes, it takes some conscious control not to mess them up.

That's a terrible analogy. A huge proportion of well-intentioned pilots are crashing their planes.

Re: Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that cuts the calories

#67

Post by CuriouslyC » Wed, Mar 25, 2015, 10:31 PM UTC

will_work4tears wrote: post #32

tremendo wrote: post #18

They're basically turning it into resistant starch. Calorie reduction is probably the lesser benefit of it. Resistant starch feeds the comensal bacteria in the gut. This is "good" bacteria. Or think of these resitant starches as the pre-biotic to your pro-biotics (the food for your bacteria friends). Rice is normally not the best for turning to resistant starch I believe, the process works a lot better for potatoes:…

I've read though, that that same bacteria produces short chain fatty acids with some non-trivial amount of calories. Also, where is this coconut oil they are putting in going when they cool it? Wouldn't the fat from the coconut oil counterbalance the savings by utilizing this method? That said, I'd rather have the short chain fatty acids than the excess carbs, so it seems a fair trade off to me.

Short chain fatty acids have a whole host of benefits. In particular, they have anti-inflammatory effects, they improve amino acid and mineral uptake, they improve insulin sensitivity and blood lipid regulation, the list goes on.

Re: Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that cuts the calories

#68

Post by buckbova » Wed, Mar 25, 2015, 10:42 PM UTC

npsimons wrote: post #58

buckbova wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you are making a rice based dessert and wanted a lower calorie ingredient but not take away from the taste or texture? Problem solved.

Eat less of the dessert; savor each bite. People who inhale a whole pint of ice cream in less than 10 minutes are the problem, and no amount of lo-cal will help them; they'll just eat more. For a large number of obese, it's not about being full, it's about eating to distraction, or eating unconsciously, or to fill an emotional need.

So if I'm making a rice dessert dish for a party, that's typically served cold anyway, I should make no attempt to make it healthier? Instead I should tell everyone not to eat (much of) it?

If there's no change in flavor or texture, this preparation seems like a win win.

Re: Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that cuts the calories

#69

Post by dguaraglia » Wed, Mar 25, 2015, 11:20 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #16

"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," I've never met anyone who cooks rice by boiling the water first. Maybe it's an Indian thing, but all the people who've ever shown me 'the right way' to make rice in SE Asian cooking, stretching from Japan to Vietnam, rinse th…

I don't know if it's an Italian thing, but growing up in Argentina I learned to cook rice as you cook pasta: first boil the water, then put the rice in, cook as needed then strain. That's the same way I saw my friend cooking rice in England.

In Brazil, on the other hand, people would put a tiny bit of water, put the rice in, turn the stove on and then wait until the rice is evaporated.

The main difference I notice is that when cooked with plenty of water and added when the water is boiling the rice doesn't get sticky (unless you overcook it like crazy.) I prefer it loose and solid instead of sticky and mushy, but then, I grew up eating it that way.

Re: Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that cuts the calories

#70

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Mar 25, 2015, 11:24 PM UTC

pbreit wrote: post #29

mekoka wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again, who eats their rice ice-cold unless they got take out the previous evening? According to many, the best fried rice is made with cooked refrigerated rice. Also, there's this excerpt in the article "Chilling the rice then helps foster the conversion of starches. The result is a healthier serving, even when you heat it back up."

Is it OK to heat it back up? Still not convinced that turning a 30 minute process into a 12 hour one is "simple".

> Still not convinced that turning a 30 minute process into a 12 hour one is "simple".

Inactive prep time doesn't add much in the way of complexity.