White rice has no nutritional value. The husk, which contains the vitamins and protein, has been entirely stripped, leaving only the soft kernel inside which has almost no nutrients. Thus minerals and vitamins are added back to white rice during the packaging process to make it somewhat healthy.
Opt for parboiled rice (closest to white once cooked) which is also similarly priced to white, or go wild – literally – and get what is called wild rice, which is just how rice should be. I’m also partial to black rice which can be quite more expensive for rice, but it’s really fragrant and tasty (but be careful with the water, it stains easily).
All of these have a higher protein content than white rice, lower calories, and the nutrients didn’t have to get added back in, they come from the rice itself.
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I’ll be brutally honest, i eat a lot of rice and it’s by far my favorite base for dishes, but nutritional value is not what i look for in rice. I’ve eaten all sorts of rice, and while i have nothing against wild rice, brown rice or parboiled rice - in fact I liked them all just fine whenever i had them and i believe everyone should try them at least once - it’s still white jasmine and basmati rice that tastes the best to me. Probably the one i enjoy least is the short grain variant used for risotto. Ultimately it always depends on the recipe. Certain types of rice fit better to certain recipes than others.
I’ll stop eating jasmine rice when I’m dead.
I live in Vietnam. If I stop eating rice, I’ll starve 😂
There are banh mi and all kinds of noodles tho.
those noodles? you guessed it, made of rice.
Yeah that’s fine, I’m not selling black rice lol, but for athletes and other fitness hobbyists we can definitely benefit from more nutritional rice than white, which is why I posted in the physical education community 😁
That’s a good point, some people can certainly stand to benefit from more nutritional rice variants.
Same, for me basmati for biryani, pilaf type dishes. Jasmine for everyday and glutinous rice for special days.
Whole grain rice also has higher arsenic content, which can be a problem if you’re pregnant or eating a lot of rice. So, it’s best to avoid eating whole grain rice for every meal. Other grains don’t have this issue. Wheat, buckwheat, oats, corn (or hominy), amaranth, and quinoa are all good choices for whole grains depending on your situation, although it can be healthier to buy organic for some of these grains to avoid exposure to glyphosate which can disrupt your gut microbiome. As always it’s best to eat a wide variety of foods.
Personally I think white rice is still a good choice as long as you stick to rice grown outside of the US. Rice grown in California can also be OK in terms of arsenic content.
It’s generally always a good choice to avoid food grown in the US anyway
That’s true, but it’s not always possible, especially if you live there like me.
Heresy.
Carbs are nutrition!
They’ll work, but they’re not great. When I used to do crossfit everyone told me to eat rice before a class but lentils worked much better. But different people will react differently to them, “bare” carbs like white flour (which is also reinforced, it goes through the same process as rice) and white rice leave me still feeling hungry most of the time
Yeah, bare carbs aren’t enough on their own for me either. Lentils are really great!
Thx for this, I’m gonna grab some wild rice next store-run.
that’s the spirit 💪
Wild rice is in fact not related to rice at all! It does have a delicious nutty flavor however. Best paired with mushrooms imo.
Huh, you learn something new every day!
Good lookin out, homie. I actually didn’t know white rice was so stripped down-- I’ve been getting it bc that’s just how I was raised, and 'cause of my mom, I know just how much can be done with a rice bowl when funds are low.
One thing to watch out for on a budget is cooking time. White basmati cooks in just over 10 mins. The wholegrain/brown rice that I sometimes get takes 25+ mins. That could more double the cooking portion of the energy bill for someone who’s mainly eating rice. Still, it can be cooked and then cooled immediately under cold water, drained, and stored in the fridge, then heated quickly for up to a few days later to save of the energy intensive part.
I think that the emergy costs for cooking brown rice are negligible given that you should be bringing your rice to a simmer and then immediately dropping the heat down to the lowest setting. With an electric rice cooker this is even more efficient.
In my experience (maybe it’s just my cooker) rice cookers only like white rice. Other types burn a layer on the bottom which makes it a chore to clean and you get less rice. I think it has to do with how rice cookers work, shutting off when they don’t detect any more water, but non-white rice taking longer to absorb water and so being exposed to the heating element longer without the protection the water provides. I cook my non-white rice in a pan now in the same way a rice cooker would do it.
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I have been tempted to try lacto fermenting rice for a while now. Perhaps I will try a batch soon. I have already had pretty great success with all the beans. lol.
sounds novel, tell me how it turns out if you end up trying it out
Jasmine rice is a league above white rice anyway
I might be wrong but isn’t jasmine rice a type of white rice?
It sure is. The tastiest kind.
I have no idea
White rice has no nutritional value.
I agree that, overall, the average person would benefit from substituting white rice for brown rice in their diets, or even from simply adding brown rice to their diet. But to state that white rice has no nutritional value, as if it was empty calories like alcohol, is a flat out lie. White rice is still one of the best sources of carbohydrates that you can get, and this has been known about for ages.
White rice is acts like “empty” carbs on many because they’re just pure sugar (albeit in carbohydrates form, a long chain of glucose) without the important fibres. Alcohol might be an apt comparison if we look at calories alone, it will indeed sustain you in terms of energy, but not much else. you would die if you drank only alcohol, even if somehow the ethanol inside didn’t affect you whatsoever. There’s just no nutrients in it aside from the calorie-heavy macros. White rice is a refined carb by definition.
It hasn’t been known for ages as white rice only became popular after WW2 and was unenriched at first, giving millions of people in Asia vitamin B1 deficiency. It was only after that that manufacturers realized what they’d been doing and added the vitamins and other micros back to rice.
So in terms of enriched white rice… you kinda have to trust the manufacturers are enriching their rice properly, preferably with the ground husk of the rice they just destroyed.
The removal of the bran from rice does indeed come with the loss of certain nutrients, but it is still not purely devoid of them as you imply, and again, not at all comparable to alcohol. White rice still comes with selenium, manganese and niacin [1], which by definition would not make white rice empty calories. Of course you will have deficiencies if your diet is formed mostly of white rice, and that is why it is expected from everyone to have half a brain and make rice a component of a varied diet; brown rice does not escape from this fact either. Keep in mind in this thread we are addressing people in the first world with a wide accessibility to varied foods, and not empoverished third world farmers.
- Fukagawa, N. K., & Ziska, L. H. (2019). Rice: Importance for Global Nutrition. Journal of nutritional science and vitaminology, 65(Supplement), S2–S3.
i’ve become the goddess of cooking white rice but for some reason every time i cook brown it comes out either goopy or burnt
That’s because brown rice is terrible.
Parboiled gang
