Cooking methods to reduce Resistant Starch?

[xploit316]

Hi everyone, lately I have identified 3 dietary triggers viz. Resistant Starch, Pectins and Nightshades that are causing mental and sleep issues for me, especially Resistant starch. Now the easy way would be to eliminate all grains, beans and other foods high in resistant starch. However, I want to keep white rice in my diet else I will be seriously loosing on calories which I dont want to do. Does anyone know if a particular cooking method (Steaming, Frying, Baking, Pressure cooking etc) is useful for reducing resistant starch?

 

[wabi-sabi]

Here's a nice blurb on WebMD:
https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-to-...nt Starch?,fewer calories than regular starch.

 

[Wishful]

What sort of mental issues? I recently became sensitive to fermentable fibre. It makes me much more lethargic and brainfogged, or 'groggy and sluggish'. I think the propionic acid produced in the colon is the most likely culprit.

For me, carbs digested in the small intestine give me insomnia, if I eat them past 2PM, although I can tolerate them again just before bed. Fermentable fibre doesn't seem to affect my sleep; just how I feel during the day, and it takes several days for the symptoms to pass (and probably for the fibre to pass).

 

[xploit316]

@Wishful I read that resistant starch is the fermentable part of the fiber, maybe its the propionic acid issue for me too. I get the following list of symptoms from consuming resistant starch. Potatoes and Beans are the worst and gives all the symptoms below, while white rice only gives symptoms 2) and 3).
1) Mental issues - Getting angry on small things, feeling depressed with racing thoughts, a regret feeling that I havnt achieved more than I should have etc.
2) Sleep issues: Mostly fall asleep only between 2am-3am, absolutely cant sleep before that how much ever I try. I eat my dinner by 8pm and stop using TV/Laptop after 9 but still no help.
3) Dry and Flaky Scalp
4) Waking up with a stiff neck, which makes a nice crack when I turn my face left and right.

Cutting out high pectin fruits and nightshades provided some help with anxiety. I have tried soaking and rinsing rice and boiling it and eating it warm but I dont think its helping me.

 

[Judee]

There are some websites that talk about cooking rice without starch though I wonder if you can really remove it completely. https://www.livestrong.com/article/466408-how-to-cook-rice-without-starch/

Here are the search engine results where I found that one but you may want to look at some of the other sites as well to see if they mention something else: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=starch+free+rice&ia=web

Edit: Although these just mention "starch" rather than "resistant starch" so maybe that's not going to match what you're looking for.

 

[Wishful]

@Wishful I read that resistant starch is the fermentable part of the fiber,

I think it's more that regular non-resistant starch is digested/absorbed in the small intestine. Resistant starch and various other complex sugar molecules (hemicellulose, pectin, etc) pass through to the large intestine and colon, where microbes can break some bonds to access their food molecules, and while doing so also release other metabolites such as the short-chain fatty acids. Then there's non-digestible fibre, such as cellulose, which passes through without change (other than getting brown and stinky).

As an experiment, you can try some easily digested starches, such as cornstarch. Hmmm, I just checked and cornstarch is not the most easily digested. One list (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5223246/) has the order (most to least) as rice, wheat, corn and tapioca, with potato as having about 200x more resistant starch than rice. If you really want calories without resistant starch, sugar should do it. Not great for satiation though.

It's surprisingly difficult to figure out which food is lowest in resistant starch. There's a lot of confusion about digestibility, with comments such as "resistant starch can't be digested by the body", which is false, since our microbes, which are part of our bodies, break it down into molecules that we can absorb/digest. Arrowroot flour is claimed as very easily digested, but it's also listed as being high in fibre, which might be resistant starch.

Another misconception is about fermentable fibre and glucose. While it's true that those molecules don't break down directly into glucose, part of it gets converted into propionic acid, which--if I understand this correctly--mostly gets converted to glucose in the liver.

I have the opposite of your issue #2. If I ate white rice in the afternoon, I'd wake up at 2-3 AM and be unable to fall asleep again. Here's an experiment: have sugar (zero resistant starch) instead of rice and see if that also creates the same insomnia. It would for me. You could also try running the cooked rice through a blender (smaller particle size should speed digestion). I'm sure that will also be less satisfying than regular cooked rice, but it's survivable as an experiment.

My most recent experiments have shown that I'm no longer as sensitive to the carb/insomnia problem as I used to be. I've been having cornstarch pancakes (without any supplemental fibre that I used to need) for lunch without having insomnia. I do seem to wake up earlier though; no more than 8 hours of sleep, whereas before I might have managed to fall asleep again for an extra hour or two.

As another experiment, if you aren't intolerant of meat, you can try going carb-free for a few days and see what happens. I'm thinking of trying that, since my proline sensitivity has declined.

 

[Wishful]

There are some websites that talk about cooking rice without starch

That seems to be about reducing the amount of regular (rapidly digested) starch, which is the kind of starch xploit316 wants to keep. I suppose some people are picky about how sticky the rice is.

@xploit316 , I found a page ( https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.24.1_supplement.922.9 ) which said that short-grain rice has the least RS, while long-grain and jasmine had the most. Parboiled has even more RS. How you cook it (aside from cooling and reheating) doesn't change RS.

So, for least RS, choose short-grain rice. I'll give that a try too.

 

[xploit316]

That seems to be about reducing the amount of regular (rapidly digested) starch, which is the kind of starch xploit316 wants to keep. I suppose some people are picky about how sticky the rice is.

@xploit316 , I found a page ( https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.24.1_supplement.922.9 ) which said that short-grain rice has the least RS, while long-grain and jasmine had the most. Parboiled has even more RS. How you cook it (aside from cooling and reheating) doesn't change RS.

So, for least RS, choose short-grain rice. I'll give that a try too.

Thanks @Wishful . Thats exactly what I was looking for. Will give short grain rice a go. I'll share my experience soon and hope you do too. Thanks again.

 

[hapl808]

Hi everyone, lately I have identified 3 dietary triggers viz. Resistant Starch, Pectins and Nightshades that are causing mental and sleep issues for me, especially Resistant starch. Now the easy way would be to eliminate all grains, beans and other foods high in resistant starch. However, I want to keep white rice in my diet else I will be seriously loosing on calories which I dont want to do. Does anyone know if a particular cooking method (Steaming, Frying, Baking, Pressure cooking etc) is useful for reducing resistant starch?

You may also want to look at the Fast Tract Diet, a theory of digestion by Norm Robillard. He discusses the different sugars present in various forms of rice, theorizing for instance that jasmine rice will digest more easily than basmati rice. I found it helpful for my overall digestive symptoms at the time, but it didn't touch my main complaint for digestion which is dysfunction and acid reflux after any mental or physical exertion.