Brown rice has more fiber. White rice also is enriched by law in the US, so your comparison is not really fair. But the amount of fiber in a cup of beans pretty much dwarfs the amount you are going to find in rice, anyways.
I eat both kinds of rice. Medium-grain brown rice is harder to get sometimes, so I'll either eat short-grain brown from the health food store, or medium-grain white rice I pick up in the Hispanic section (Goya, for instance). Long grain rice is just not authentic for many kinds of food.
Good point. Unless the minerals evaporate with the steam, they've got to remain in the pot unless, as you say, the rice is boiled and drained. I hadn't thought about that.
Of course "rice paddies". This post is making me revisit my childhood. It's been close too four decades since I've had any crawdad rice croquettes. The biggest harvest of the rice fields was crayfish. I'd usually find them in the brackish water of a back bay swamp. Actually crabbing was easier on the piers. I don't think any Japanese ate any more fish and rice than I did growing up. We never cooked eels.
I don't understand why that has to be "versus". I appreciate different sorts of rice, for different dishes, different days and even seasons.
That's just a personnal observation. If I eat a several dish meal, with rice as a side, there's no difference. But if I make a meal of only rice (or with small side items), I eat twice the amount of white rice than of brown rice to feel well, and I feel hungry sooner with the white one. Idem for bread, pasta, potatoes, the "modern ones" are quicker to swallow and forget. That difference counts for me as the 2 only diets I know when my clothes become too tight are changing of laundry powder or a period of BLM ("Bouffe La Moitie", Eat Half ).
Also in this season, Japanese white rice is very good as it's new and fragrant. In a few months, it won't be that pleasant. So I'll be glad to have brown rice, red rice, sticky rice and maybe if I can make a trip or stopover I'll buy Thai fragrant rice, or black sticky rice, or basmati, or arborio, or...
In addition, the important is the pleasure you have to eat it. I like myself too much to force me to eat stuff I don't like. If I were you and I didn't appreciate brown rice, I wouldn't even look for reasons to eat some.
You want to know where brown rice really shines? Manganese! One cup of cooked brown rice provides 50% DV. Yeah, I know -- not very glamorous. But that's verdict at this goldmine of a nutrition site I uncovered:
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This site discusses health benefits and provides nutritional profiles -- in both amount and %DV -- of all the foods listed. The other notable nutrients in brown rice are these, with their respective %DV:
But these are all present in just middling amounts, nothing really to write home about. And that just about covers it for brown rice. If you look at the in-depth nutritional profile for brown rice, you'll see that good fats appear to be almost nonexistent:
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This site has a wealth of info. I spent about an hour flipping back and forth between different foods, comparing nutritional profiles. For a real shock, check out the one for romaine lettuce. Shoot, even 1 cup of baked potato stands about equal to 1 cup of cooked brown rice. And eating it isn't drudgery.
You know, middling is such a judgmental word - especially when one can get
1/4 of one's daily recommended values from a 1 cup side dish.
Again, I ask you who claimed brown rice was a wonder food? The comments I've read say that it's better than white.
Rather than comparing brown rice to vegetables, why don't you compare brown rice to white? Well, a reason other than the fact that the web site you mentioned doesn't consider white rice healthy due to all the nutrients lost in processing.
As for being a drudgery - you must not be fixing it right. I find brown rice to be a wonderful component as a bed for grilled chicken, as an ingredient in red beans and rice, or in just about any place one might use white rice.
Rice pudding, on the other hand, doesn't work with brown rice.
My obsessiveness is as tireless as a swarm of rampaging sea lions. I've used the data in the above chart to come up with a nutritional %DV comparison for one cooked cup of brown and unenriched white rice. Only the standout nutrients are listed, as everything else appears trivial.
Though whfoods.com declares that "white rice is simply a refined starch that is largely bereft of its original nutrients", the above stats show that this is simply not the case. It deserves mentioning that one cup of cooked white rice is a very small amount. In Asian meals at our place, two cups is more like a standard serving, and eating 3 or 4 cups is not out of the question.
Actually, I like brown rice in certain settings. Just not as the anchor in Asian cuisines. My wife and I had sukiyaki the other night. We each ate at least three cups of cooked white rice. Plus beef and tofu and chrysanthemum leaves (shungiku) and napa cabbage and long onions and fresh shiitake and other assorted bits. Can you manage to get down three cups of brown rice along with the quantities of all that other goodness? It's simply too heavy in the stomach. This is what I mean by drudgery.
I think it's reasonable to say that these data support the statement that polished rice is "largely bereft of its original nutrients".
Although polished rice in the US is required to be enriched with B1, B3 and Fe, rinsing it (which appears to be very widespread, IME), you lose almost all of the fortification.
The intact bran also keeps the starches from hydrolyzing as much while cooking, which reduces the speed with which eating it makes blood sugar rise (compared to the same rice if polished).
I often prefer brown rice for white, though for biryani or Persian chelo/polo, only polished basmati will do (and it smells HEAVENLY!). Someone here suggested adding some gunpowder green tea to rice while cooking it; that is really nice! (It's particularly good with brown basmati. ;-)
For rice flour, I have never found an occassion where using brown instead of white caused any noticeably different flavor or behavior, so I always use brown.
Again, I'll ask you "what reputation?" (third times a charm, maybe)
I'm serious in this. I simply have never read or heard anyone claim that brown rice is a nutritional power house. The only realistic claim I've heard is that it is better for us than processed white rice which has lost much of its nutrient value. So why eat "empty calories"?
It's the same claim made when we're admonished to eat whole-grain bread rather than white, and whole-grain cereals rather than processed.
Of course, I do know of a few "off beat" claims about brown rice helping mental and emotional conditions. But that's a different matter.
I'm simply wondering if someone has made this claim to you or if you've determined that it has this "wonderful" reputation on your own.
Are you old enough to remember the "health food" movement of the 60's &
70's? This is when brown rice and tofu were popularized in US. And these two formed the exalted foundation for all that was good for you, to the point of parody, even.
But you probably want hard science, not history, right? How's this for an example of brown rice's esteem in American minds:
"In a 1996 survey, however, when 1,009 Americans were asked which of five foods--lettuce, asparagus, navy beans, brown rice, and oatmeal--provided the best source of cholesterol-fighting soluble fiber, many missed the mark. Brown rice was incorrectly chosen by 64 percent, lettuce by 46 percent, and asparagus by 48 percent. In fact, only navy beans (chosen by 60 percent) and oatmeal (chosen by 75 percent) are rich sources of soluble fiber"
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Actually, you need to look no further than yourself when asking about the reputation of brown rice. When I asked what exactly was so good about brown rice, you replied that it had cholesterol-lowering unsaturated fats. This claim appears to be bunk, a product of the power of myth.
Why harbor a suspicion that food is an enemy and that only the most healthful -- and least palatable -- can be swallowed with a clean conscious? I take in empty calories all the time, simple because I'm fit, eat healthy, and so can afford to. To throw your question back, why eat brown rice when less-caloric fruits and vegetables offer better nutrition?
But the assumption that white rice has no place in a sound diet is pure folly.
Um, no. Sorry. But I know enough about the 1970s to believe you.
Ah. Ok. I'll buy that.
But then, I tend *not* to listen to the general public and prefer to listen to what my "nutrition and health" instructor taught us in my college class.
Same reason I go back to my nutrition class for information and not the latest fad diet book. Although...The Southbeach Diet book has some pretty tasty recipes.
Sorry, Crymad, but the above paragraph is just wrong.
Even your own links have listed monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats as components of brown rice. So how can the claim be "bunk"? Are you going to discount the very references you've been using?
The claim isn't bunk, it's just not particularly meaningful when brown rice has only 3% of the recommended daily values of each type. But that doesn't mean that they aren't there and that they aren't the "good" types of fats. And it doesn't mean that there are more of them in brown than in white rice.
Remember, I never said that brown rice had enough to make a significant difference. I said it had more than white rice. I've never disagreed with the assertion that it's not a "nutritional powerhouse."
Because "red beans and apples" just doesn't appeal to me.
Again, my points have been about choosing brown rice over white when appropriate, not about choosing brown rice over other foods.
As is the assumption that switching from white to brown will fix a body's ills.
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