I had never heard of the Grayns Rice Cooker before so did a little Google search. This following assessment questions the claims of any benefits to be derived..... I'm not sure if distributing this product will reflect well on the reputation of BXN as a whole........ Not sure how I feel about this latest announcement :/
HOW WHITE RICE WORKS
Rice starts out as a grass. It's a grain that is inedible because of a hard outer shell.
The grain is milled to make brown rice. The brown rice can be further refined by removing the bran, husk, and embryo, leaving only the white endosperm. The endosperm is almost entirely composed of two different starches. One is amylopectin, which is a quickly digested molecule as it has many end points onto which enzymes can attach. The other is amylose which has fewer end points and takes longer to break down. Make note of this, it will come up later.
Polish the endosperm and you have white rice. White rice has a longer shelf life than brown rice, but most of the nutritional value (fiber, protein, fat, vitamins, etc) is lost when you get rid of the bran, husk, and embryo, so the United States requires processors to enrich white rice with vitamins and other nutrients, which appear as a dusty layer on the individual grains (whether they are as easily absorbed by the body as the nutrients naturally present in brown rice is another story). Now you have "enriched" white rice which is what you buy at the supermarket.
HOW COOKING WHITE RICE WORKS
When you add water to enriched white rice, the water gets milky because the grains are covered in the "enrichment" powder and starchy endosperm powder left over from the polishing step of the refining process.
That milky water has starches in it from the powdered rice. Those starches are converted to glucose ("sugar") and absorbed much more rapidly than the starches in solid rice, just like drinking a bottle of apple juice will spike your blood sugar way faster than just eating an apple.
You can cook the rice in the milky water and the rice will be a little bit stickier when it's done because that powder turned into a sort of glue when it was boiled down. You'll eat all the nutrients added as well as the rapidly-digesting starchy powder byproduct of the polishing process.
But a lot of people rinse the rice once or several times until the water is clear before cooking it. Rinsing the rice removes most of the powder. So you are rinsing out the added nutrients and some of the caloric value of the rice. How much is removed depends on the temperature of the water and how many times or how vigorously you rinse it.
It is critical to understand that the instructions for the Grayns rice cooker call for rinsing the rice several times before putting it in the machine. This step alone will remove a portion of the starchy calories from the rice.
HOW GRAYNS WORKS
Grayns claims to produce a "healthier," "sugar-free" white rice through its special cooking process. The machine heats the rice in the water to a special temperature intended to gelatinize the fast-digesting amylopectin starch in the rice that you can't remove just by rinsing alone. Then the amylopectin-rich water is drained out of the machine before the cooking finishes, leaving you with a rice with a higher ratio of amylose to amylopectin that will convert to sugar more slowly inside your body.
WHY THE THEORY IS NOT BULLSHIT
There are several documented scientific methods for cooking white rice in a way that makes it digest more slowly by altering the amylopectin-amylose ratio. For example, rinsing before you cook and then cooling the cooked rice in the refrigerator overnight
has been demonstrated to dramatically change the starch ratio in rice. Grayns may have found another path toward that goal without the need to eat cold rice.
It's true that eating white rice will cause your blood glucose levels to rise quickly, which causes a reaction in your body that, repeated over time, will cause serious cardiovascular problems including type 2 diabetes. This is true for other simple starches, too, like bread and pasta. It's not as bad as drinking Mountain Dew or eating a bag of Skittles, but it's the same idea. It's better to eat whole-grain carbohydrates which are more nutritious and have a higher fiber content which slows digestion. That is why brown rice is considered to be healthier than white rice.
WHY THE PRODUCT IS DEFINITELY BULLSHIT
- You could manually drain the starchy water from the rice at the end of the cooking process and achieve roughly the same result as the Grayns cooker.
- The video shows that one cup of white rice = 10 tsp sugar. There's no sugar in white rice. It's a starch that is converted into glucose by the body. Glucose is a kind of blood sugar. So when they say that their machine makes rice with "less sugar," they're using twisted scientific language in an attempt to make the concept simpler to understand, but to me their claims are just wrong. I don't know how they came up with the 10 tsp sugar per cup equivalence.
- The Grayns cooker is marketed in SE Asia, where they are not required to enrich their white rice with nutrients. If you were to use this machine with rice bought in the US, the draining process would severely reduce the nutritional content of the rice. Further, starch in Asian, short-grain white rice is almost entirely amylopectin, the starch Grayns claims to drain out during cooking, which I presume they mean when they say "sugar." But if that were true, then cooking 100g of dry rice would yield roughly 20g of cooked rice which is ludicrously wasteful and not at all reflected in the videos/pictures.
- When they say that the Grayns rice cooker cooks rice the way nature intended I laughed out loud. Not just because appeals to nature are a logical fallacy, but because cooking is a human invention--not natural at all!
- Here's their graph showing how much of an effect their special rice has on blood sugar levels. What is the variable on the X-axis? Why no numbers? Where did they get these measurements? Without an explanation or citation, it's worthless.
- Lastly, there are a million other proven, natural (lol) ways to mitigate the effects of a blood sugar spike when you eat carbs with a high glycemic index.
- Eat crunchy vegetables first in a meal. These digest more slowly and will hav a sort of "parachute" effect on your blood glucose levels. Eat your broccoli before your mashed potatoes.
- Carbs are your body's preferred fuel. Endurance athletes eat simple carbs during workouts and races because they need the glucose in their blood RIGHT NOW. Plan to eat more carb-heavy meals before your most active parts of your day so that you USE the fuel.
- Remove simple carbs from your diet where possible and replace them with more nutritious alternatives. White rice just really isn't good for you. It's just cheap calories that are easy to store, cook, and eat. Beans, oatmeal, and lentils offer the same advantages but are much better for you to eat.
