Health Spotlight: Brown Rice
March 1, 2010 by Standing on Truth
Filed under Nutritional Living
If you are gluten-sensitive like me, you may have found that many of the products you are substituting gluten with contain a base of this food. Cookies, snack bars, crackers, bread, pasta. . .so what am I speaking of?
Brown Rice
First, an interesting note, from “The World’s Healthiest Foods” website: “Our food ranking system qualified brown rice as an excellent source of manganese, and a good source of the minerals selenium and magnesium. The complete milling and polishing that converts brown rice into white rice destroys 67% of the vitamin B3, 80% of the vitamin B1, 90% of the vitamin B6, half of the manganese, half of the phosphorus, 60% of the iron, and all of the dietary fiber and essential fatty acids. By law in the United States, fully milled and polished white rice must be “enriched” with vitamins B1, B3, and iron. But the form of these nutrients when added back into the processed rice is not the same as in the original unprocessed version, and at least 11 lost nutrients are not replaced in any form even with rice ‘enrichment.’”
They go on to say that brown rice (in part due to its high fiber content) can help to lower cholesterol, maintain a health body weight, reduce the risk of colon cancer (due to being a source of selenium), and possibly protect against “hormone-dependent cancers as well as heart disease.” That’s pretty good for a simple bowl of rice!
And if you get really ambitious and want to do a whole body cleanse (and to see the health benefits of cleansing, click here), a doctor I take a lot of nutritional advice from has outlined a Brown Rice Cleanse that I am getting ready to try in a couple of weeks. Here is what Dr. Linda Page has to say about her cleanse: “A brown rice cleanse is based on macrobiotic principles for body balance. It’s cleansing, yet filling. You don’t feel like you’re on a cleanse at all, yet it does the trick. It’s a diet that uses rice as a nutrient building food, and vegetables and vegetable juices as concentrated cleansing supplements. A brown rice cleanse is high in potassium, natural iodine, and other minerals, so most people notice improvement in their hair, skin texture and nail growth.”
A meal that is a staple in our home is teriyaki chicken with stir fry onions and bell peppers on a bed of brown rice. My mouth is watering already! So with many different uses and many valuable benefits, have fun experimenting with brown rice!
