Which Rice is Right for You?

 

By Jimmy Olivieri

 

As of recent years, nutrition plans abound have touted brown rice as a healthier, more nutritionally valuable source of carbohydrates and nutrients when compared to plain, white rice. Nutritionally speaking, whole grain, brown rice is micronutrient dense, as the husk and bran remain intact with the actual grain. During white rice processing, the husk and bran is removed, leaving only the plain white grain, stripping the food of a solid vitamin and mineral profile. However, this emergence of whole grain, brown rice as a healthy and nutritious source of carbohydrates, fit for athletes and non-athletes alike, is entirely deceiving. Surprised? If not, your dilemma can be resolved with two words, “self defense.”

When considering every form of life alive today, each individual organism has inherently developed certain self-defense tools or techniques. If they didn’t have these self-defense abilities, they would have committed self-extinction due to their lack of resistance to any form of predator. Now, at this point, you are asking yourself what this has to do with whole grain, brown rice. See, as an organism, whole grain brown rice has developed two nasty compounds as a defense mechanism: phytic acid and lectin.

Phytic acid, the first compound, is contained within the whole grain element of the rice, and binds to all the valuable minerals just consumed in the whole grain and renders them completely useless to the body, resulting in their removal from your body instead of being digested. This presents quite a problem. The whole grain, or husk, that contains the valuable nutrients also contains a substance that renders them completely useless to the body. While inhibiting mineral absorption of the whole grain rice during digestion, this phytic acid has a bad habit of binding to minerals already present in the body. Essentially, this can leave someone more mineral deficient than they were before actually consuming the brown rice. All this being said, the whole grain doesn’t just stop at phytic acid as a means to protect itself.

Whole grains, beans and soy, and members of the nightshade family (tomato, potato, peppers) generally all contain what is considered toxic levels of the compound lectin. Lectin boasts a myriad of threats to the human body’s system, that is, its ability to inactivate, and promote, proteins consumed and inflammatory responses by the body. An accumulation of lectins, therefore, can result in acute and chronic health conditions, including autoimmune conditions. One of its most aggressive assaults on the body occurs on the gut wall, and linings, inciting inflammation and causing lectins to be absorbed into the blood stream.

Now that brown rice has been flipped on its head, in a sense, lets break it down to what we need to know when making the right dietary choice for ourselves. Whole grain, brown rice, by no means, will hastily sling you into a unhealthy state of being just by eating it every once and awhile. See, lectins accumulate, in larger amounts than you think, with repeated consumption of its carriers. So, brown rice is still an acceptable option when it comes to the food. However, white rice is stripped of its bran and husk,thus removing phytic acids and lectins. And, white rice remains a solid carbohydrate source that is easily utilized by the body, while generally only being about 10 points lower on the glycemic index when compared to brown rice. This makes white rice a less toxic, and more viable, source of carbohydrate for athletes and non-athletes alike.