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How Overnight Cooked Rice Can Be a Healthy Breakfast

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In olden days, farmers and laborers, especially of South East Asia, who did a lot of physical work ate fermented rice for breakfast. Fermented rice is called pazhankanji or vellachoru in Malayalam, pazhaya saadam in Tamil and paaniwala chawal in Hindi.

Traditionally rice is cooked in the afternoon and excess water is drained. After the rice cools down to room temperature, it is soaked fully in water and stored in an earthen clay pot. This covered pot with soaked rice is left overnight at regular room temperature. The rice would ferment by the next morning and is eaten for breakfast. Traditionally, it is eaten with a side dish, raw onion or green chili. Some prefer to drain excess water and eat it with yogurt and a slight sprinkle of salt.

The lactic acid bacteria break down the anti-nutritional factors in rice resulting in an improved bioavailability of micro-nutrients and minerals such as iron, potassium and calcium by several thousand percentage points. For example, after 12 hours of fermentation of 100 grams of rice, the availability of iron changed from 3.4 mg to 73.91mg (an increase of 2073%).

In the agrarian communities of South East Asia, fermented rice played a big role in the lives of people. It gave the energy, the nutrition and the cooling effect that they needed for a full day of manual labor. Unfortunately, people moving up the food chain (or wealth chain, rather) looked down on fermented rice as the pauper’s food and ignored the great nutritional value it provides.

Food scientists who researched on the food practices among various regions in the world and concluded that the South Asia’s tradition of consuming the previous day’s cooked rice soaked in plain water overnight, in the morning next day, as break-fast, is the best. It has the rare B6 B12 vitamins which are not otherwise easily available in other food supplements. This rice generates and harbors trillions of beneficial bacteria that help digestion and has many disease fighting and immunity developing agents. The bacteria that grow in the intestines due to this rice safeguard the internal organs and keep them fit and ready. Consuming this rice helps quicker digestion and wards off ageing, bone related ailments and muscular pains. Brown rice is the best for this as its nutrients are retained intact.

American Nutrition Association has listed the following benefits if you stick to the practice of consuming such soaked rice.

  • Consuming this rice as breakfast keeps the body light and also energetic.
  • Beneficial bacteria get produced in abundance for the body.
  • Stomach ailments disappear when this is consumed in the morning as excessive and harmful heat retained in the body is neutralized.
  • As this food is very fibrous, it removes constipation and also dullness in the body.
  • Blood pressure is normalized and hypertension subsides appreciably.
  • Body feels less tired due to this food as a result of which one feels fresh throughout the day.
  • This removes allergy induced problems and also skin-related ailments.
  • It removes all types of ulcers in the body.
  • Fresh infections are kept at bay due to consuming this rice.
  • It helps in maintaining youthful and radiant look.

Consuming this takes away your body’s craving for tea or coffee. This is the richest source of vitamin B12 for vegans. So, do not throw away that extra rice you had cooked. It could be the healthiest breakfast you will ever have.

Source: http://nationalhealthtips.blogspot.in/2014/11/healthy-foods-how-overnight-cooked-rice.html

Image Source: http://healthandmindcare.com/overnight-cooked-rice-as-a-super-healthy-breakfast-388.html

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Why exercise won’t make us lose weight?

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It couldn’t be more true,” nutritionist and CNN contributor Lisa Drayer said. “Basically, what I always tell people is, what you omit from your diet is so much more important than how much you exercise.”
Think of it like this: All of your “calories in” come from the food you eat and the beverages you drink, but only a portion of your “calories out” are lost through exercise.
According to Alexxai Kravitz, an investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases — part of the National Institutes of Health, “it’s generally accepted that there are three main components to energy expenditure”:
Basal metabolic rate, the amount of energy it takes just to keep your body running (blood pumping, lungs breathing, brain functioning)
Breaking down food, scientifically referred to as “diet-induced thermogenesis,” “specific dynamic action” or the “thermic effect of food”
Physical activity

For most people, basal metabolic rate accounts for 60% to 80% of total energy expenditure, Kravitz said. He cited a study that defines this as “the minimal rate of energy expenditure compatible with life.” As you get older, your rate goes down, but increasing your muscle mass makes it go up.
About 10% of your calories are burned digesting the food you eat, which means roughly 10% to 30% are lost through physical activity.
An important distinction here is that this number includes all physical activity: walking around, typing, fidgeting and formal exercise,” Kravitz said. “So if the total energy expenditure from physical activity is 10% to 30%, exercise is a subset of that number.
“The average person — professional athletes excluded — burns 5% to 15% of their daily calories through exercise,” he said. “It’s not nothing, but it’s not nearly equal to food intake, which accounts for 100% of the energy intake of the body.”
What’s more, as anyone who’s worked out a day in their life can tell you, exercising ramps up appetite — and that can sabotage even the best of intentions.
According to calculations by Harvard Medical School, a 185-pound person burns 200 calories in 30 minutes of walking at 4 miles per hour (a pace of 15 minutes per mile). You could easily undo all that hard work by eating four chocolate chip cookies, 1½ scoops of ice cream or less than two glasses of wine. Even a vigorous cycling class, which can burn more than 700 calories, can be completely canceled out with just a few mixed drinks or a piece of cake.

“It’s so disproportionate — the amount of time that you would need to [exercise] to burn off those few bites of food,” Drayer said.
The sentiment here is that you’ve “earned” what you eat after working out, when instead — if your goal is to lose weight — you’d be better off not working out and simply eating less.
Of course, not all calories are created equal, but for simplicity’s sake, 3,500 calories equal 1 pound of fat. So to lose 1 pound a week, you should aim to cut 500 calories every day. If you drink soda, cutting that out of your diet is one of the easiest ways to get there.
“The other thing is that exercise can increase your appetite, especially with prolonged endurance exercise or with weight lifting,” Drayer said. “It’s another reason why I tell people who want to lose weight to really just focus on diet first.”

“All this is not to say that exercise doesn’t have its place,” Drayer said. “It’s certainly important for building strength and muscle mass and flexibility. It can help to manage diseases, including heart disease and diabetes. It can improve your mood. It can help fight depression. But although exercise can help with weight loss, diet is a much more important lifestyle factor.”
As the saying goes: Abs are made in the kitchen, not the gym.

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/04/health/diet-exercise-weight-loss/index.htm

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