We eat 480,000 metric tons of rice a year, but many of us don’t know what it is.
If you type the phrase “is rice” into the Google search bar, it’ll fill in the rest of the question to indicate what the world is asking. In this case, the top two results are “is rice gluten-free?” and “is rice a carb?”
People just have no idea what rice is made of, which is a little shocking considering the amount of rice we eat.
In the 2017/2018 agricultural calendar alone, global consumption of rice topped 480,000 metric tons, so it’s probably a good idea to understand what exactly rice is and what it does to our bodies.
Is rice a carb?
Yes, rice is very much a carbohydrate. To be more precise, it’s a complex carb. To break it down even further, brown rice is an unrefined complex carb, and white rice is a refined complex carb.
Though we usually look down upon the unrefined things in life, unrefined carbs are actually a good thing when it comes to our health. The unrefined complex carbs found in brown rice require our bodies to do some work to digest them, which keeps us from having dramatic swings in our blood sugar and insulin levels. Because brown rice’s husk is intact, it contains tons of beneficial vitamins, nutrients and fiber (1.8 grams per serving) that can help lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of Type 2 diabetes.
White rice, on the other hand, is a refined complex carb, because the high-fiber parts of the grain have been removed by machinery. This makes the carbs easy for our bodies to digest, leading to unwanted sugar crashes. Compared with the 1.8 grams of fiber found in brown rice, white rice only contains has 0.4 grams of fiber.