Do you love potatoes and rice as much as we do? If so, keep reading…
Cooking and Cooling Potatoes and Rice
The two-step process of cooking and then cooling potatoes or rice creates resistant starch. Resistant starches are prebiotics (remember from last week?) and cannot be absorbed into the bloodstream. They’re essentially indigestible carbohydrates, and healthy gut bacteria love to feed on them.
In turn, this produces short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) that support the gut microbiome and lead to fat loss and overall health. For example, it produces butyrate, an anti-inflammatory short-chain fatty acid that increases the health of your intestinal cells and helps to prevent barrier permeability (known as “leaky gut”). This improves our digestion, hormone regulation, immune system, metabolism, and more.
How can you create resistant starch in your potatoes and rice?
Making potatoes or rice the day before and letting them cool overnight in the refrigerator can result in up to three times (for potatoes) or two and a half times (for rice) the amount of resistant starch. The more you cook and cool them, the more resistant starch forms!
How can this help with fat loss?
Consuming cooked and cooled potatoes and rice can lower your blood sugar response as compared with eating potatoes that haven’t been cooled. This helps you get into fat burning mode quicker than eating these starches normally. Plus, since these become resistant to digestion, we also absorb less of the calories from the potatoes and rice.
So yes, please dig into the leftover bowl or rice or potatoes from last night’s dinner!
