Please Don’t Worry, Eating White Rice is Fine
My changed perspective on refined carbohydrates
“Why are there so few overweight Japanese people? They eat so much white rice!”
After several years of living in Japan, when I went back to the United States I was asked this by someone. It was kind of an awkward question, one that I didn’t even know how to approach, because I didn't agree with how the person was equating eating white rice with weight gain. This thought surprised me, because just a few years back, I used to be really afraid of eating refined carbohydrates too.
Japanese people eat lots of rice. It’s no hidden fact: on average, a modern typical Japanese person consumes 82.1 kg of rice per year — for comparison, Americans consume about 10.8 kg. In Japan, rice is often served in school lunches and in government cafeterias. It comes with almost every kind of Japanese meal, most typically as short-grain white rice. Yes, the rice that’s served is not brown, black, red, or wild: just plain white rice.
What happens when we place taboos on certain foods
Lots of people still cringe at the term white rice. While the pervading notion that all carbohydrates are bad has passed — we admit the health benefits of whole grains and fiber-rich starchy…
