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by LiquidSky 890 days ago
Why would anyone ever voluntarily eat a whole grain rice onigiri?
2 comments

White rice has one of the highest glycemic indexes.

Japan has a 12% diabetes rate, which is just above the US at 11%.

this says it's 7% in Japan: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/diabetes-... , but I found another source that says 12% for 2016.

Diabetes scales with obesity and age. Japan has a very old population, but less obesity than the US. White rice despite its glycemic index is not super high calorie. If it's a contributing favor, it's because of weight-gain, not glycemic index.

edit: better source: https://www.diabetesatlas.org/data/en/country/101/jp.html, https://www.diabetesatlas.org/data/en/country/211/us.html

There's more diabetes in the US.

IIRC sticky rice is the worst among white rices. I find it tasty but try to eat basmati most of the time.
> White rice has one of the highest glycemic indexes.

This is correct, but do keep in mind the impact that cooling down has on starches.

A fresh bowl of rice is very high, but cool it for a couple of hours and the GI drops considerably.

Cool it overnight and it drops even more. Onigiri is usually in the cooled down to over-night range.

This never makes rice particularly good from a GI perspective, but preparation is a considerable factor.

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One study, but this is fairly well reproduced: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26693746

And a more general write up: https://www.diabetes.org.uk/guide-to-diabetes/enjoy-food/car...

I don’t get that. I would say the same about white rice. Why would I ever eat it when I could be eating delicious black rice?

And before you start, I eat a gō of rice virtually every day.

I’m genuinely confused about the popularity of white rice.

I had no idea black rice existed until you mentioned it. I imagine that this is likely the same for many others.
Black rice exists, I've seen it in a shop of a friend, though not tasted it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_rice

There are also other food items which have versions that are black in colour, some of which could be not naturally, but by processing them in some way, for example, black garlic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_garlic

Googling your favorite food name with "black" as a prefix could be interesting.

ChatGPT, generate for me a program to automate this, given a list of favorite foods.

Don’t forget red rice! Rice is crazy and my old ideas of wetlands and white rice have been crushed by reality.
Black sticky rice is a favorite dessert of mine. I always have to resist it when I see it on a menu at a Thai restaurant.
What is gō? It is hard to Google.
It’s the Japanese equivalent of “cup” as a measurement unit, and at 180 ml is about 76% of a US cup. Japanese rice cookers are marked and filled in units of gō. You put n gō of uncooked rice in it, and then fill water up to the n mark. One gō is roughly 150 grams of uncooked rice, which amounts to around 530 kcal. Traditionally, a wooden box was used to measure one gō: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Masu,_One-Gō_measure...
A Japanese measuring unit for rice, kind of analogous to "one cup" in US kitchens. Measuring cups distributed with rice cookers are usually one gō in volume even in the US.
Board game. You place one rice grain at the first field and double it for each next field. Eat it all.
"go of rice" works. It's 3/4 cup.