Rice is widely
consumed in Asian countries as the main dish in everyday meal and the biggest
source of carbohydrate intake by most of population. There are many types of
rice, but this article will be focused on white rice as the most popular rice consumed
by Asian society.
Almost 90% of
rice is carbohydrate that we call as starch, only 2% of fat and 8% of protein.
Due to its processing from unhulled to become rice, (mostly during milling and
polishing to remove the rice bran), rice loss most of its valuable vitamins in
minerals. So starch is what we really eat from rice mostly only to get its carbohydrate.
Starch in rice
consists of 2 major polysaccharides (carbohydrate polymers) which are amylose
and amylopectin. Rice starch contains 80-90% amylopectin and 10-20% amylase. Due
to some enzymatic processes, amylopectin is easier to be digested in intestine
than amylose. Thus, the higher amylopectin compound of rice, the higher starch
can be broken down to be glucose. The higher and faster the food component
digested and broken down to be glucose, the higher glycemic index is (GI). GI
refers to a number associated with a particular type of food that indicates the
food's effect on a person's blood glucose (also called blood sugar) level. In
the texture itself, cooked rice with high amount of amylopectin tends to be
softer. The higher amount of amylose resulting harder texture of cooked rice. Generally, we can say that the harder of cooked rice texture is, the
lower its GI is.
So, why is
this related to diabetic patients? Well, as we promised that our articles will
be explained as simple as possible for your easy reading. Here are the tips to
get and make “healthier” rice for diabetic patients.
As we can find
many varieties of rice in the market, find rice which tends to get harder
texture after cooking (in Indonesia, maybe you are familiar with beras pera), to get higher amylose
content in it, in other word rice with low GI. You can notice the difference by
the time you cook the different types of rice with the same cooking condition
(same amount of water, same time of cooking, same temperature). Harder texture
of the cooked rice might have lower GI than the softer ones.
You can also modify the normal rice you have
at home by modify your method of cooking. The starch from rice can be turned to
be resistant starch. Resistant starch is degradation of starch that can escape
from digestion in the small intestine, without digested into glucose. The higher
resistant starch in the food is, the lower GI is. This resistant starch also
will make us to feel full longer. For some reasons, resistant starch simply has
similar function as fibre.
There are several technology
to modify starch in the rice to get higher resistant starch. There are two simple
technologies that you can try at home:
· Put less water less than 35 g/ 100 g when you
cook the water (maybe about half of water than the usual amount you usually
put) and heat it at temperature higher than 100 oC. How to get this
temperature? You can close the lid of your cooking pan to get higher
temperature of steam.
· Do more than one cycle of cooking. After cooking
(or heating), let rice becomes cool, and then cook them again. It simply
explained to get higher gelatinization temperature resulted in higher
possibility to get resistant starch.
These tips do
not only apply to those diabetic patients. Nowadays, more people are concern in
healthy food. These tips can be used for those who want to do diet but cannot
get rid of eating rice less in their meal. These also applied to those who have
digestion problems.
Sarajevo, 16 December 2014.