Organic brown rice is becoming increasingly popular as a food choice for many people who are concerned for their health and wish to help prevent various illnesses and diseases further down the line which it can help with.
It is no surprise that the rate of cardiovascular disease is much lower in Japan than in the U.S. as scientists at the Cardiovascular Research Center and Department of Physiology at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia have discovered as to why this may be.
The Japanese people eat rice almost every day and these include organic brown rice and partially polished varieties of rice. Many studies show that brown rice and especially organic brown rice is a remarkably healthy food choice because it provides a good source of fiber, B vitamins and other nutrients.
I personally recommend using organic wild brown rice as the best option. But, even if you don’t buy organic, just making the switch from white rice to brown rice is a great first step to a healthy diet.
So what exactly is brown rice? Very simply put, brown rice is what rice looks like before it has gone through the milling, refining and processing which gives us the more common white rice. White rice is what’s inside brown rice after the brown rice is polished down, removing the bran and the beneficial nutrients. Unfortunately the white rice which most people still eat has had most of its nutrients stripped by the milling process.
This includes 67% of vitamin B3, 80% of B1 vitamins, 90% of vitamin B6, half the manganese and phosphorus, 60% of the iron, and all of the fiber and essential fatty acids. Hence white rice can almost be seen as a nutritionally dead food whereas organic brown rice or brown rice is packed full of vitamins, nutrients and fiber.
You will also often notice that white rice often has the word ‘enriched’ on the label. This is quite misleading because the white rice is artificially loaded with chemicals and additives in the form of perhaps synthetic vitamins which cannot be processed effectively within the body, hence it is nutritionally deficient.
In fact it has been shown that white rice is so deficient in nutrients that it does not even meet the minimum nutritional requirements of the FDA guidelines. For this reason, white rice must be chemically altered with vitamins and iron just so that it can be sold in our supermarkets.
In comparing white rice to organic brown rice or just ordinary brown rice even, there really is no comparison, as nutritionally they are worlds apart.
The health benefits of organic brown rice/ordinary brown rice can be shown and summed up as follows:-
– Organic brown rice/ordinary brown rice is a good source of the important mineral, Selenium, which has been shown to be a powerful cancer fighter as well as protecting against heart disease and inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis.
– Just one cup of cooked brown rice provides over 80% of our daily manganese requirements which is the precursor for making the ‘healthy’ cholesterol in our bodies as well as being important to the health of the nervous and reproductive systems.
– Organic brown rice/ordinary brown rice can actually promote and assist in weight loss due to the fiber content which keeps our bowels healthy and regular.
– The fiber content of brown rice also protects against colon cancer as the fiber attaches to toxins and poisons within the gut and helps expel them from the body. Hence brown rice can also help with any digestive issues and problems such as relieving constipation and irritable bowel syndrome.
– The fiber contained within organic brown rice/ordinary brown rice is really important for good gut and digestive health. After all, it is now said that 70% of our immune system is located and processed from the gut.
– Organic brown rice/ordinary brown rice breaks down and releases its sugars much more slowly than white rice so there is better blood sugar stabilization and controlling of blood sugar. In fact studies in Asia have shown a link between the consumption of white rice and risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
– New research shows that individuals who eat at least two servings of brown rice weekly can reduce their chances of developing type 2 diabetes by up to 11%.