Dieters of the world can breathe a sigh of relief. There is now an easy way to cook rice that will cut the calories by more than half, and it's backed by science to boot.

At about 240 calories per cup, white rice and other starchy carbohydrates like it can cause weight gain. The reason lies in the difference between digestible and indigestible starches.

A digestible starch doesn't take long for the body to break down and gets converted into glucose and then glycogen. Glucose that doesn't get converted into glycogen ends up becoming fat, which of course leads to weight gain. However, there's something called resistant starch in rice that isn't a digestible type of starch, so it takes the body a longer time to digest, meaning it doesn't get converted into glucose or glycogen, and therefore ends up being less caloric.

An undergrad student and his professor at the College of Chemical Sciences in Sri Lanka thought that if they could turn digestible starch into rice resistant starch, they could decrease the amount of calories in the rice. After experimenting with 38 different varieties of rice, the research team found a way of reducing the amount of calories by 50 to 60 percent.

For the calorie conscious out there, here's what you do. Add a teaspoon of coconut oil to boiling water and then add a half a cup of rice. The researchers let this simmer for 40 minutes, but you can simmer it for 20 to 25 minutes instead. Then, refrigerate it for 12 hours. With this new recipe, it may be a while before you can actually eat your rice, but at least cutting calories is a pretty easy process overall, and isn't that what really matters?

This method increased the rice resistant starch by 10 times for traditional, non-fortified rice. So why do so many calories go bye bye? The coconut oil makes the starch in the rice resistant to digestive enzymes, meaning fewer calories will be absorbed by the body. The cooling process also helps create a resistant starch because hydrogen bonds form between amylose molecules in the grains, the soluble part of the starch.

This new finding could have much bigger implications for the world than just helping you prepare for bikini season. As the Washington Post's Wonkblog points out, obesity rates around the world are rising, especially in developing countries where rice is a major staple, such as China and India. Though there are many contributing factors to the rise in global obesity rates, cooking lower-calorie rice could be a step in the right direction for a healthier world.

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