Speaker 1 (00:33):
I wanna go through some of your burning questions about rice. And I brought four types of rice and I thought we’d go through, well, who’s your friend? Who’s not your friend? First question, what does rice do in your body? Well, rice, uh, has been around for 8,000 years. It’s been cultivated by humans for 8,000 years. What I assure my patients is that there’s about four billion people in the world who use rice as their staple, uh, carbohydrate. So that’s a lot of people. A lot of people say, “Why do you say white is better than brown?” Well, one of the main reasons is that rice does have a lectin, but it’s primarily in the hall. Most grains, most of the lectins, with the exception of gluten, are in the hall, the outside part. White rice is better than brown rice because the hall’s been removed.

(01:50):
As I point out, the hall from rice has been removed for 8,000 years. Four billion people use rice as their staple, and yet four billion people remove the hall from rice and eat it white. Why? Because the mischief, believe it or not, is in the hall. As I wrote about in the plant paradox, I take care of a woman from Japan who is a very famous health influencer’s representative in Japan. And this poor woman had severe rheumatoid arthritis. And she followed this person’s diet to a tea. It’s an Ayurvedic diet. And yet, she had already, in her mid- 20s, had two hip replacements. And she was basically bedridden. A colleague of hers from Canada had read my book, and he sent the plant paradox to this woman. And she started eating the plant paradox. And one of the first things she did was stop eating brown rice, which was part of her diet.

(03:06):
And she substituted Indian white basmati rice. Lo and behold, her pain went away. Her rheumatoid arthritis markers went away. And she actually flew to Palm Springs and walked through the door and gave me a big hug for changing her life. How did I know? Well, because I’ve spent 30 years now studying where lectins are, the effects they have on autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. And again, why do cultures always try to detoxify their food that they live on? And smart cultures always take the hall off of brown rice, because that’s where most of the lectins are. Now, there are still some lectins in rice, white rice, but you can usually take care of that with a pressure cooker. So brown rice is not a health food, just like whole wheat is not a health food. Wheat was first grown 10,000, 12,000 years ago in the fertile crescent, which is where Iran is now.

(04:26):
And from day one, people always tried to mill the hall off of wheat to make it whiter. In fact, there were debates in ancient Greece, in Rome, about who had the whitest wheat. It turns out it was Egypt. In ancient England, only the rich got white flour, and the whole flour was reserved for the peasants. Why? Because only the rich could afford to have their flour milled. So all cultures have figured out a way to get rid of the hall, and rice is no exception. Now, there is some debate as to whether wild rice, which is a grass, and quite frankly, these are grass seeds. Does wild rice have a lectin? There is a mixed bag as to whether these have lectins. But wild rice usually has far less lectin content than brown rice. And in general, you’re not gonna use as much wild rice, number one, because it’s expensive, uh, than you would in using these.

(05:49):
So in general, I ask people to just avoid these two rices in general. Okay. You hear me talk about basmati rice. So here’s the bad news. There is white basmati rice from India, and it says Indian basmati long grain white rice. There is American white basmati rice, California. Unfortunately, our basmati rice is a totally different strain than Indian basmati rice. So what? Indian basmati rice has a very low, slow to digest starch. So it’s a very resistant starch. On the other hand, American basmati rice, even though they’re both called basmati, has a very quick digested starch. So the exact same bowl will have totally different effects on, number one, your blood sugar. But more importantly, the longer a starch takes to digest, the more likely that those long stuck together starch molecules will make it past our small intestine and will arrive down in our large bowel, our colon, where our gut buddies are waiting to eat it.

(07:30):
And so if you’re going to have rice, please look for white basmati rice from India rather than American basmati rice. And, and I don’t know if the camera can see this, but you can see that they’re actually totally different looking. They don’t even look like the same grain of rice because they’re not. They’re really totally different, even though they have the same name. So if I have some people who absolutely do have food sensitivities to rice, they have to have white rice, but then they also have to pressure cook it. Most people, once you get the haul off of rice, it’s usually safe as long as you use basmati rice. Finally, even though this has more resistant starch than this, you can take any rice and make it more resistant starch by cooking the rice and then cooling it. And that’s increases the amount of resistant starch.

(08:46):
Then you can reheat it. In fact, interestingly enough, in both Japan and China and India, most people cook their rice on a weekend in a rice cooker, and I have a rice cooker, then they set it aside. They set it out, and they dole out the rice every day, sitting out on the counter, cooled. And I always was curious, well, why do they do that? Why don’t they just, you know, eat it? Because they’ve made it resistant throughout the wheat by it sitting out at room temperature. Cultures are very clever, and part of what I’ve done over the last 30 years is go around the world, finding out how very healthy people have made a potentially unhealthy food, healthy, and that’s what they do. Now, what about fermented rice? Well, anytime you ferment a grain, you’re going to eat a lot of the lectins. For instance, the Incas, it’s true.

(09:51):
They use quinoa as their main starch. But what most people don’t know is that even the Incas knew how bad it was for them. So they detoxified it. What did they do? They let it rot. They mixed it with water. Then they allowed it to ferment. Then they cooked it. So they knew this trick, and unfortunately, it’s not on the packaged directions. Again, most Asians know to take the whole off of rice, because that’s where the trouble. Now, how about sake is another question, rice wine. Again, anytime you ferment a beverage like rice wine, you’ve taken the lectins out of the equation. There’s one exception. Sadly, fermentation does not break down gluten, which is a lectin. Believe me, it’s been tried, it’s been experimented with, and sadly, in my patient’s experience, even a pressure cooker will not break gluten into safe compounds. So that’s why beer, which is a fermented, usually wheat-based product, still is mischievous to me, my patients.

(11:20):
Another question I get, does rice spike blood sugar? Well, again, it’s depending on the type of rice that you use. Regular rice cooked in a regular way will absolutely spike your blood sugar. If you grind up rice into a powder like rice flour, it mainlines sugar. But the more you can make rice resistant to digestion by cooking it using a highly resistant starch rice like white past might rice from India, it’s pretty safe. By having said it’s safe doesn’t mean it’s a great idea. Why? As I’ve mentioned before, the most, to me, important number on your cholesterol panel isn’t your total cholesterol, isn’t your LDL, the soap called bad cholesterol. Isn’t even your HDL, the so- called good cholesterol. It’s your triglycerides. Why? Because triglycerides are the first form of fat that we manufacture from sugar and starches. And the higher people eat starches that are easily broken down, the higher their triglycerides go.

(12:45):
I’ll give you a great example. Years ago, when I discovered that sorghum and millet do not have lectins because they have no hull, I’m a big fan of sorghum popcorn for my patients who want popcorn made out of corn. Smells like popcorn, taste like popcorn, has the mouthfeel of popcorn, but it’s little beaty looking popcorn. Like anything else, I decided to do a test. So for two weeks, I had one cup of sorghum popcorn as my treat before dinner. And I measured my triglycerides before I started, and then I measured my triglycerides two weeks later. Now, I tend to run my triglycerides quite low. My range for my patients is 40 to 50. So mine were about 45. Two weeks into just adding sorghum popcorn to my diet, my triglycerides went to 128. I did nothing else different. Why? Because anytime we take a starch and then make it more available to digestion through popping, for instance, we expose all those starch molecules to easy digestion, and that spikes are sugar, and we convert it into triglycerides.

(14:23):
So for me, even though it doesn’t have any lectins, that was a bad choice. Now, my wife, on the other hand, doesn’t rapidly convert these carbohydrates into triglycerides. So she can sit there munching her popcorn made out of sorghum with me drooling at her and have a different effect. I do have people who can tolerate rice. If you have insulin resistance, if you have diabetes or pre-diabetes, if you have a fasting insulin level above nine, then rice, no matter how you cook it, is not your friend. On the other hand, if you’re one of the lucky ones like my wife, then properly cooked, properly selected rice can be an additional part of the diet.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. If you did, please share this with family and friends. You never know how one of these health tips can completely transform someone’s life when you take the time to share it with them. There’s also the Dr. Gundry Podcast YouTube channel, where we have tens of thousands of free health insights that can help you and your loved ones live a long, vital life. Let’s do this together.