The Miracle of How I Was Able To Eat Rice Again After Being Resigned To Subsist on Quinoa, Farro and Glass Noodles With My Chinese Food

 

In talking with many of my Asian-American friends and family in my age group, I have found that a significant portion of them are diabetic or pre-diabetic and have to alter their diets accordingly.  And for people who live most of their lives eating meals centered around rice, and to a lesser extent, noodles, this is a very painful experience, since Chinese cuisine really isn't Chinese food without these carb loaded foods.   Indeed it is widely known that instead of greeting someone with the words "How are you?"  Cantonese say "Sihk faan mei?" which literally is "Have you eaten?"  Perhaps not as well known is that the word "faan" means rice.  But on the glycemic index, where a rating of 100 means ingesting a particular food is equivalent to eating pure sugar, with some white rice varieities having a glycemic index approaching 90,  eating rice is an unaffordable luxury for many of us.  Thus, over a decade ago I was exiled into a world of quinoa, farro and saifun, with occasional spoonsful of rice only on special occasions.  And having barely survived a number of foreign vacations where a week or two without rice was painful enough, the new normal for me was not a happy one.

After having to limit my intake of rice and noodles, I started to hear about some strange anomalies.  First was that fresh rice noodles like chow fun or pho have a lower glycemic index putting them in the safe eating range.  And then somebody told me that Uncle Ben's converted rice actually had a very low glycemic index. While these statements were surprising, I had never bothered to discover any rationale and accepted these as weird exceptions.  Though I never was a fan of Uncle Ben's and didn't go out and buy any, I did happily start eating chow fun and cheung fun again.

But then I heard something that has turned out to be life changing.  Based on medical studies from about 15 years ago, when refrigerated, cooked rice becomes a low glycemic food, infinitely more palatable for diabetic and pre-diabetic eaters.  The operative concept is that of "resistant starch."  Scientifically, this means in this altered form, the affected carbohydrate no longer breaks down and releases glucose into the bloodstream.  Some foods are naturally high in resistant starch, such as beans, lentils and whole grains.  But there's the whole other category of foods which release high levels of glucose into your bloodstream when freshly cooked and eaten hot, but form resistant starch when cooked and refrigerated.  Besides rice, this includes noodles and potatoes.

Of course the obvious question is what happens to a cooked and cooled resistant starch when it is subsequently reheated?  Does the heating make them villains again?  Apparently for rice and noodles, reheating the food does not alter the resistant starch status.  There seems to be some disagreement about reheated potatoes, but there's more evidence than not that the same rule applies to refrigerated and reheated potatoes.  

 

Note that Chinese-American folklore claims that fried rice is better for you than plain rice.   Well as all Chinese cooks know, you should use leftover rice for fried rice, not freshly cooked rice, because fresh rice produces a soggy product, while leftover, refrigerated rice has had time to dry out.   When I was a kid, everybody knew restaurants used leftover rice for fried rice, maybe even getting leftovers off the diners tables after they left.  These days, I don't know if Chinese restaurants are permitted to reuse rice like this, so to be safe (from a resistant starch point of view), you might want to refrigerate and reheat your fried rice, too.

So what about fresh rice noodles and presumably cheung fun (rice noodle rolls)?  What makes eating these items freshly cooked them so palatable with a low glycemic index?  Well with fresh rice noodles I've been told that their production involves taking cooked rice, cooling it, and then grinding it up and mixing it with starches and other ingredients.  This renders the ultimately minted rice noodle a low glycemic, resistant starch product.  

 

However, there is a caveat to that because I saw a report out of Hong Kong which indicated that steamed rice noodle rolls there had a very high glycemic index.  So why would rice noodle rolls in Hong Kong have a different profile from that in the United States. That's because in the past few years a new style of rice noodle  (distinctively softer and wrinkled) had been invented in Guandong province and Hong Kong using stone ground rice flour. So I'm presuming that these are processed differently not to include an initial cooking and cooling of the rice flour, but going directly from the rice flour to rice noodle stage.  So the old style cheung fun, whose rice wrapper was very similar to the fresh chow fun noodle, is low glycemic, while the new style one which is becoming more and more commonplace in the United States is not.  Consequently, to repeat the benefits of low glycemic refrigerated rice, the new style rice noodle rolls themselves need to be refrigerated.  Ditto with traditional mei fun rice noodle dishes made from rice flour.  

 

 

Classic cheung fun (sometimes called "intestine" style) which is OK to eat freshly cooked.

 

 

Newfangled krinkly cheung fun.  Be safe and refrigerate overnight, then reheat before eating.

 

  

There are other benefits to resistant starches besides the lower glycemic index, so much as to garner the coveted "superfood" tag.  In any event my interest is in the effects on blood sugar, and I'm now able to enjoy more Chinese rice, dry rice noodle, and wheat noodle dishes than I could have imagined a year ago, just by eating them as leftovers, with the A1C results to show that resistant starches really do work for me.