Search Results for: white rice

Red Meat and White Rice, Oh My!

Posted by on March 25, 2012 118 comments

This started as a note for an Around the Web, but has grown … so it will stand on its own.

The Red Meat Study

The Paleosphere has been abuzz about the red meat study from the Harvard School of Public Health. I don’t have much to say about it because the claimed effect is small and, at first glance, not enough data was presented to critique their analysis. There are plenty of confounding issues: (1) We know pork has problems that beef and lamb do not (see The Trouble With Pork, Part 3: Pathogens and earlier posts in that series), but all three meats were lumped together in a “red meat” category. (2) As Chris Masterjohn has pointed out, the data consisted of food frequency questionnaires given to health professionals, and most respondents understated their red meat consumption. Those who reported high meat consumption were “rebels” who smoked, drank, and did not exercise. (3) The analysis included multivariate adjustment for many factors, which can have large effects on assessed risk. Study authors can easily bias the results substantially in whatever direction they prefer. I’ve discussed that problem in The Case of the Killer Vitamins.

So it’s hard to judge the merits of the red meat study. However, another study from HSPH researchers came out at the same time that was outright misleading.

The White Rice and Diabetes Study

This study re-analyzed four studies from four countries – China, Japan, Australia, and the United States – to see how the incidence of diabetes diagnosis related to white rice consumption within each country.

Here was the main data:

The key thing to notice is that the y-axis of this plot is NOT incidence of type 2 diabetes. It is relative risk within each country for type 2 diabetes.

I looked up diabetes incidence and rice consumption in these four countries. Here is the scatter plot:

Here is the complete FAO database of 86 countries, with a linear fit to the data:

UPDATE: O Primitivo has data for 162 countries and a better chart. Here it is – click to enlarge:

If anything, diabetes incidence goes down as rice consumption increases. Countries with the highest white rice consumption, such as Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, have very low rates of diabetes. The outlier with 20% diabetes prevalence is the United Arab Emirates.

A plausible story is this:

  1. Something entirely unrelated to white rice causes metabolic syndrome. Possibly, the something which causes metabolic syndrome is dietary and is displaced from the diet by rice consumption, thus countries with higher rice consumption have lower incidence of metabolic syndrome.
  2. Diabetes is diagnosed as a fasting glucose that exceeds a fixed threshold of 126 mg/dl. In those with impaired glucose regulation from metabolic syndrome, higher carb intakes will tend to lead to higher levels of fasting blood glucose. (Note: this is true for carb intakes above about 40% of energy. On low-carb diets, higher carb intakes tend to lead to lower fasting blood glucose due to increased insulin sensitivity. However, nearly everyone in these countries eats more than 40% carb.) Thus, of two people with identical health, the one eating more carbs will show higher average blood glucose levels.
  3. Therefore, the fraction of those diagnosed as diabetic (as opposed to pre-diabetic) will increase as their carb consumption increases.
  4. In China and Japan, but not in the US and Australia, white rice consumption is a marker of carb consumption. So the fraction of those with metabolic syndrome diagnosed as diabetic will increase with white rice consumption in China and Japan, but will be uncorrelated with white rice consumption in the US and Australia.

Thus, diabetes incidence may be lower in China and Japan (due to lower incidence of metabolic syndrome on Asian diets), but higher among Chinese and Japanese eating the most rice (due to higher rates of diagnosis on the blood sugar criterion). This explains all of the data and is biologically sound.

What did the HSPH researchers conclude?

Higher consumption of white rice is associated with a significantly increased risk of type 2 diabetes, especially in Asian (Chinese and Japanese) populations.

No: Internationally, higher consumption of white rice is associated with a significantly reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, and the Chinese and Japanese experience is consistent with that. Carb consumption is associated with a higher rate of diabetes diagnosis within populations at otherwise similar risk for diabetes. White rice consumption is correlated to carb consumption especially strongly in Asian (Chinese and Japanese) populations.

Food Reward and “Eat Less, Move More” in Diabetes

Of course, the study authors knew that diabetes incidence is lower in countries that eat more white rice. How do they reconcile this with their claim that white rice increases diabetes risk?

The recent transition in nutrition characterised by dramatically decreased physical activity levels and much improved security and variety of food has led to increased prevalence of obesity and insulin resistance in Asian countries. Although rice has been a staple food in Asian populations for thousands of years, this transition may render Asian populations more susceptible to the adverse effects of high intakes of white rice …

In other words, rice-eating countries have higher physical activity and more boring food – just look at the notoriously tasteless cuisines of Thailand, China, and Japan – and their inability to eat high quantities of food has hitherto protected Thais, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Indonesians from diabetes.

However, once those rice eaters become office workers and learn how to spice their rice with more varied flavors, the deadly nature of rice may be revealed.

Stephan Guyenet writes that “Food Reward [is] Approaching a Scientific Consensus.” It certainly seems so; it is emerging as a catch-all explanation for everything, a perspective that can be trotted out in a few concluding sentences to reconcile a hypothesis (white rice causes diabetes) with data that contradict it.

Conclusion

To me, the HSPH white rice study doesn’t look like science. It looks like gaming of the grant process – generating surprising and disturbing results that seem to warrant further study, even if the researchers themselves know the results are most likely false.

Consensus or no – and consensus in science isn’t necessarily a sign of truth (hat tip: FrankG) – the food reward perspective seems to me an incomplete explanation for what is going on. It puts a lot of weight on a transition from highly palatable (Thai, Japanese, Chinese) food to “hyperpalatable” (American, junk) food as an explanation for obesity and diabetes. It seems to me that the lack of nutrients and abundance of toxins in the junk food may be just as important as its “hyperpalatability.” It’s the inability of the junk food to satisfy that is the problem, not its palatability.

I’m glad that the food reward perspective may start being tested against Asian experiences. That may shed a lot of light on these issues.

The Health Benefits of White Chocolate (yes, they exist)

Posted by on March 26, 2014 79 comments

I have a strange chocolate-related pet peeve. When someone tells me “You like white chocolate? But that’s not even real chocolate!”…it makes me want to hurl a block of white chocolate right at their smug face.

White chocolate gets absolutely no respect, while dark chocolate can apparently cure cancer and bring the dead back to life. And the darker the better. If you like 70% dark, your foodie friend will undoubtedly poo-poo that in favor of 85% or darker. Well it’s finally time to stand up, white chocolate lovers! All three of you. Because white chocolate is healthy, and here’s why.

The advantages of white chocolate

First off, dark chocolate is healthy, and is a PHD-recommended “supplemental food”. But just like how Arnold Schwarzenegger overshadows Danny DeVito in the movie “Twins”, so goes the relationship between dark and white chocolate. They share the same mother (the cacao tree) and the more popular sibling has desirable traits absent in the less popular sibling (flavonoids and psychoactive compounds). But just like Danny DeVito, white chocolate actually has a heart of gold (or rather, a heart of stable fatty acids).

White chocolate is simply cocoa butter plus some added milk, while dark chocolate is cocoa butter with (dark) cocoa particles added instead of milk. Each can have varying levels of sugar. White chocolate undergoes remarkably little oxidation during storage or cooking, unlike vegetable oils that autooxidize and may become carcinogenic. A quick look at the fatty acid profile of cocoa butter explains its stability. It’s made up of 60% saturated fat split between stearic and palmitic acids, about 30% monounsaturated, and only 3% polyunsaturated fat. The high stearic acid content means that cocoa butter has a smaller effect on cholesterol than do other fats with similar saturated percentages.

chloe-chocolate

Cats can’t read nutrition labels…or can they?

Plus cocoa butter has been shown to improve resistance to oxidation in rats when compared to vegetable oil. Cocoa butter may even help protect against fatty-liver related endotoxemia, via upregulation of an enzyme called ASS1 (argininosuccinate synthase 1, hee hee).

Dark chocolate sometimes contains mycotoxins and aflatoxins (which can be carcinogenic, depending on dose), whereas white chocolate doesn’t. While cocoa butter doesn’t have nearly as many health benefits as dark chocolate, it’s been shown to benefit platelet function and potentially atherogenesis more than dark chocolate (in men, but not in women…why must you be so confusing science?).

Finally, white chocolate isn’t toxic to dogs and cats due to low theobromine levels, whereas a high-percentage dark chocolate bar could kill a small dog. White chocolate also has negligible amounts of caffeine and other bioactive compounds, due these being water soluble and hence removed during processing. For those sensitive to dark chocolate, who exhibit symptoms such as as intestinal distress or headaches after consumption, white chocolate may be a good alternative.

Why is white chocolate a black sheep?

So why is cocoa butter rarely eaten (outside of chocolate bars), when other low-PUFA fats such as coconut oil and ghee are prized? Three reasons stick out: price, availability, and stigma. High-quality dark chocolate costs around a buck an ounce or less. It’s hard to even find high-quality white chocolate outside of some internet stores, and the price of edible pure cocoa butter is typically 50% or more above that of dark chocolate. Plus pure cocoa butter doesn’t really come in the form of standard-sized chocolate bars.

If you want bars, you have to jump down from 100% cocoa butter to around 30% or much lower, and these bars typically have almost 50% sugar content. Note that in 2002, the FDA set a minimum cocoa butter percentage of 20% in order for a product to be labeled “white chocolate”. But this definition also included minimum levels of milk solids and milk fat, so those staying away from milk may prefer pure cocoa butter. In my Willy Wonka white chocolate utopia, there would be 70%, 85%, and 92% white chocolate bars available at every grocery store, but as it stands you have to buy sugary white chocolate or make your own lower sugar version using cocoa butter.

“Cocoa Cooking”: say it three times fast

Stigma is a real problem for white chocolate producers. For some reason, the white chocolate lobby simply doesn’t have the power of Big Pharma or Tobacco, so you’ll never see ads encouraging you to try healthy cocoa fat in recipes. But you definitely can. The popularity of mole sauce suggests that even strong chocolate flavors can be handled in savory dishes. One chef says:

“It’s important that people break out of the mindset of chocolate as candy. Chocolate is chocolate. If you let it stand on its own, it becomes an ingredient like cumin or butter. If you let go of what your preconception of chocolate is–which for 99.9 percent of the people is a candy bar–it becomes another culinary weapon in your larder.”

Indeed, for most of its history, chocolate was exclusively used with savory/spicy ingredients. Cooking cocoa butter with meats or veggies may give them a heartier flavor, or you could try something more daring like salmon with white chocolate sauce. Snacks made with cocoa butter may be more practical than snacks high in coconut oil, as cocoa butter doesn’t melt around room temperature like coconut oil does.

Compared to dark chocolate, white chocolate needs much less sugar to mask bitterness (especially for us supertasters). It also complements delicate flavors whereas bitter dark chocolate overwhelms them, so my hunch is that white chocolate (or just cocoa butter) could provide a versatile base for things other than just sauces and desserts.

If you cook for someone, and the dish has cocoa butter or white chocolate in it, be prepared to defend your daring choice. Concerning the claim that white chocolate isn’t actually chocolate, I find that a bit ludicrous. When cocoa beans are pressed, they ooze out cocoa butter. It’s very similar to the relationship between olives and olive oil, or coconut flesh and coconut oil. When’s the last time you heard “Olive oil? But that isn’t even real olive!” I’ll chalk the misunderstanding up to the prevalence of fake white chocolates (below 20% cocoa butter or often none at all) combined with the rarity of dishes made with cocoa butter. You can’t like white chocolate if you haven’t had it, or if all you’ve had is an overly-sugared white chocolate bar.

Conclusion

Theobroma, the genus containing the cacao tree, translates to “food of the gods”. Chocolate was used as currency by ancient Mayans, and kept in safes with gold and precious stones. While dark chocolate is currently exalted as a king among medicinal foods, white chocolate has become the court jester. This is a shame, as white chocolate holds promise as a healthy and underutilized cooking ingredient.

White chocolate and cocoa butter keep extremely well at room temperature, so don’t be afraid to buy some and do your best Iron Chef impression. If the dish works out, feel free to comment here with the recipe. And if you find a high-quality white chocolate bar low in sugar, let me know. Kamal/Chocomal/Caramal excels in taste-testing.

Is Shou-Ching to blame for our rice habit?

Posted by on June 23, 2011 140 comments

I thought I’d interrupt the lipid series to talk about the place of rice in our diet. This is also an opportunity to explain to those who haven’t read the book the logic underlying our diet.

The occasion: Cliff at PaleoHacks questioned our endorsement of white rice:

White rice is touted to be basically pure starch by Paul Jaminet on the basis that Asian people eat it so it must be healthy right?

Not exactly. Cliff goes on to express concern about phytate toxicity and low nutrient density. Rose (in the comments) was concerned about beriberi (thiamin deficiency disease).

There were a lot of great replies, especially Melissa McEwen’s. (Melissa found some statistics on the fraction of phytate destroyed by cooking, and improved Wikipedia’s data on phytic acid content of foods.) I got a laugh out of John Naruwan’s answer (which he intended to be humorous):

My theory on Jaminet’s apparent love of white rice is his Chinese wife. My own wife is Chinese (well, Taiwanese). When I explain that maybe white rice is not so good for optimal health, I get the speech about Chinese people eating rice for thousands of years, blah blah blah. Bottom line: you try telling a Chinese person that rice is anything less than good for you and you happen to be that person’s husband, well, basically you’ll be sleeping on the sofa for a week.

In fact Shou-Ching is as interested in good health as I am. She often makes the point that in traditional Chinese cooking rice was eaten more as a palate cleanser than as a staple calorie source. We like white rice, but if evidence showed it to be unhealthy we’d be equally quick to stop eating it.

And, John – Shou-Ching is so nice, when she gets mad at me she goes out and sleeps on the sofa!

The Logic Behind Our Diet

Although we consider our diet to be a “Paleo” and “Pacific Islander” diet (by the way – read Jamie Scott’s report from Vanuatu if you haven’t already!), we did not construct the diet according to the syllogism, “People (from the Paleolithic, or East Asia, or any other place or time) ate this way, and were healthy, so we should eat that way too.”

Rather, our approach is more reductionist and centered around nutrients and toxins. Our diet aims to simultaneously achieve two ends:

  • Obtain enough of every nutrient to be fully nourished. It shouldn’t be possible to improve health by adding further nutrients.
  • Eat so as to minimize the diet’s toxicity, by eating very little of any one toxin. Since “the dose makes the poison,” tiny quantities of diverse food toxins can be tolerated, but no one toxin should be abundant in the diet.

A third principle is that meals should be tasty and delicious. We believe our innate taste preferences evolved to help us be healthy, and therefore pleasurable meals are healthful meals. (This was our sticking point with Stephan Guyenet’s interpretation of food reward: see Thoughts on Obesity Inspired by Stephan, June 2, 2011.) Apart from healthfulness, however, we consider tastiness of food to be a positive value in its own right. Luckily we believe the most healthful diet is also the tastiest!

The Place of Rice in Our Diet

Any food which is low in toxins can be included in our diet. Low toxicity is the key, because a missing nutrient can be obtained from other foods – or from a multivitamin or supplement. But there are usually no antidotes to a toxic food.

Rice is very low in toxicity. Most rice toxins reside in the bran, so milled white rice is already low in toxins. The great majority of white rice toxins are destroyed in cooking.

As a result, cooked white rice is almost toxin free. Cliff worried about phytic acid, but the amounts in cooked white rice are small – lower than almost all other seeds, nuts, grains, and legumes, and about one-twentieth the level found in such foods as sesame seeds, Brazilnuts, and pinto beans, as Wikipedia (and Melissa) have pointed out.

Phytic acid is also not all that dangerous. It is a mineral chelator, which leads to minerals being excreted rather than absorbed. The primary risk is that it will induce a mineral deficiency. Because phytic acid preferentially binds iron, which can be dangerous, some advocate its supplementation.

We don’t agree with that, but we don’t consider the small amount of phytic acid in rice to be dangerous, especially given that we recommend a mineral-rich diet and supplementation with both a multivitamin and specific key minerals.

Optimize Diet, Not Foods

Nutrient density of an individual food is not an overriding concern. Only the diet needs to be optimized – not individual foods. It’s OK to eat a food that is low in nutrient density if other nutrient-rich foods make up for it.

Our diet derives only about 20% of calories from carbs. Even for rice lovers, rice is unlikely to provide more than half that, or 10% of energy. If rice is half as nutrient dense as alternative “Paleo” starches, it diminishes nutrient intake by only 5%. That’s easy enough to make up by eating more vegetables, liver, and eggs – or by taking a multivitamin.

Many Paleo dieters speak of “cheat” foods, as if it was somehow immoral, or a violation of the diet, to eat them. There are no “cheat foods” on our diet.

For instance, we’ll often eat strawberries with whipped cream sweetened with rice syrup. This is low in nutrients, but also low in toxins. It would not do as the primary food of the day, but as a dessert or snack it is quite healthy.

Glucose is a Nutrient

This is a point many low-carb dieters seem to forget. Macronutrients are nutrients too.

The body needs glucose. Glycoproteins and polysaccharide molecules like glycosaminoglycans are important structural components of the body; certain cell types rely on glucose for energy; and the immune system relies on glucose for generation of reactive oxygen species to kill pathogens.

If no carbs are eaten, the body has to generate glucose from protein. Glucose production may be insufficient or suboptimal. That was the point of our Zero-Carb Dangers series.

Of course, in excess glucose could become a toxin. But the same can be said for protein and polyunsaturated fats. We don’t exclude meat or salmon from the diet because they can be over-eaten. One shouldn’t exclude rice either.

Conclusion

A healthy diet should contain a diversity of foods. This will reduce the diet’s toxicity, improve micronutrient ratios, and increase meal pleasurability.

Rice should not provide a large share of dietary calories – probably not more than 10% – but there is no reason to reject it merely because it is a grain. True, it comes from a bad family. But it’s the good child. Don’t hold its relatives against it.

Cambridge Fried Rice

Posted by on December 12, 2010 57 comments

CarbSane has asked for a recipe for Yang Zhou Fried Rice; Yang Zhou is a city in southern China in a leading rice-farming region.

As far as we know there is no special ingredient, though Wikipedia says that barbecued pork is a characteristic ingredient. The great thing about fried rice is that you can adjust the ingredients to your taste; use as many or as few as you like. So, here is our recipe — let’s call it Cambridge Fried Rice.

The key steps are to “fry” (really, warm and coat in oil) the ingredients separately, to get a good diffusion of oil throughout the rice and food.

Here’s how it’s done. As always, click on images to enlarge.

First, gather ingredients. You’ll need oils, eggs, long-grain rice (short-grain rice sticks together and doesn’t work as well), plus other ingredients of your choice.  Here are peas, carrots, scallions, and shrimp — we’ll also use mushrooms:

Friedrice1b

Next, scramble some eggs. Use whatever oil you like, we think eggs go well with butter:

Set the scrambled eggs aside, add new oil to the pan (now we’ll use olive oil), and add any of the miscellaneous ingredients that need cooking:

Again, set these ingredients aside:

The long-grain rice should have been cooked, but long enough ago that it has had time to cool and dry. Traditionally, fried rice uses leftover rice — cooked earlier in the day or the previous day.

Add oil (now we’ll use coconut oil) and rice to the pan, stir until rice has soaked up the oil and is uniformly coated:

Now return all the ingredients to the pan, mix, and add spices to taste:

In this case we added salt and pepper, divided the fried rice in two, and added turmeric to one half. (Soy sauce can be added to hot oil when frying vegetables and meat, but it’s not necessary.)

Serve:

We haven’t measured weights or counted calories, but it’s fairly obvious that this is a fat-rich (oils, egg yolks), carb-moderate (rice), protein-light (shrimp, egg whites) recipe with vegetables for good measure — essentially, the Perfect Health Diet macronutrient ratios.

This is the basic recipe, add spices or ingredients to your taste!

If you would like another view of Yang Zhou Fried Rice, from a professional chef, here’s a video: