From an article in the Washington Post:
tinkering with a new way to cook rice that can reduce its calories by as much as 50 percent and even offer a few other added health benefits.
…
“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.”
Do you remember several years back the “latest news” was that Coconut Oil had huge health detriments and all the theaters clamored to find something else to pop their popcorn in? Do you think the news you read has anything to do with the “coconut oil council” trying to find new markets for a their drop in market share?
Calories don’t just disappear – if you put them in the pot the energy they provide is still there. Adding any kind of oil merely adds more caloric energy – actually more per unit of weight than does adding carbs – so would actually add more energy.
I did read the link you gave – how I interpreted it: nothing but generalities peppered with internal links to ads and link generators to previous articles.
The telling sentence was the one: “at very least… something is different.” Really the only thing that has been truthfully shown to prevent absorption of calories was when they used to pop a capsule of tape-worm eggs (really true). Tapeworms prevent absorption. A person can “eat for two” and every few months pop some meds or something that causes the worm to break and you can defecate out most of the worm. It can then begin growing again and you can go back to eating for two. That fad obviously went out once the FDA was established.
dj, I think the only thing you are missing is whether or not the calories are digestible.
“If you can reduce the digestible starch in something like steamed rice, you can reduce the calories” – it’s like the calories are still there, but the body will not use them and instead they get passed as excrement.
Regardless, you need calories, as well as carbs to live. I feel like it’s a little backa#$wards to spend the time “removing” calories from something by making it less digestible instead of modifying serving size to fit your diet appropriately.