Comment by newscracker
9 years ago
Whole rice is not as much a problem as polished white rice. You could eat unpolished rice, like brown rice, red rice, etc., depending on what's available locally, that have all the fiber and other nutrients intact. This will also help fill your stomach with lesser quantity than polished white rice because of the fiber that's in them. If you have access to other grains, like quinoa, millets, amaranth, you could use them since they're somewhat close to rice in how you can use them (tangentially, this not a great idea for regular consumption if these items are imported from distant countries, since they'd have environmental and social impacts as well).
Rice, in general, has a pretty high glycemic index. From: http://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glycem...
Glycemic index of Brown Rice is 68, White Rice is 73, Coca Cola, in comparison, is only 63.
But, what makes white rice so really horrible, is not just the glycemic index, but the glycemic load - the net-impact on blood sugar. It's off the charts huge for a typical 150 gram serving of white rice at 43, (compared to just 16 for a coca cola).
Kind of mind blowing, that if you are worried about blood sugar, you are better off drinking 2 cans of 250 ml coke, instead of one 150 gram bowl of white rice.
That's because the Coke is 55% fructose. And most of that 500ml is water, with less than 50 grams of sugar in each can. In other words, there's less than 45 grams of glucose in two cans of Coke.
Fructose won't spike your blood sugar, but it's bad for other reasons, and so I wouldn't necessarily say that two cans of Coke is better than a cup rice.
Oh, definitely not suggesting Coke is better than rice, but if you are primarily concerned about an insulin reaction from glucose loading in the bloodstream, I am still amazed to discover that eating a bowl of rice will spike more glucose into your blood than drinking two cans of coca cola. It's so counterintuitive that I almost don't believe it.