In my dry food cupboard at the moment i have basmati rice, arborio rice, long grain rice, brown rice and pudding rice, which is small and round.

According to my best friend Wiki rice has the second highest production in the world after maize (corn) and is part of the staple diet of a large part of the world, especially India and Asia, China being the leaders.

When i was a child the only rice i ever saw went in my mother rice pudding and that was delicious. It wasn’t until i had left home and moved to London to train has a nurse that i realised there were different types of rice, although i would go home any day and have a large bowl of my mother’s rice pudding.

I think most people will know that rice is grown on flooded plains and is an annual plant, which means it has a yearly cycle. The quality of the nutrients in rice depend upon a number of factors, whether it is white, brown, red or black, where it was grown, which country, and the nutrient content of the soil and also how it is processed. By just comparing white rice to brown rice, brown rice contains more fibre than white but the nutrient content is about the same.

Wiki very kindly gives us a nutrient comparison chart, which you can see here  with other grains.

Brown and white rice are the same plant. The difference being that the brown rice goes through a milling process that removes the husks, which in turn makes the rice look white. Out of the two varieties brown rice would be the more natural product and therefore ‘real food’. Yesterday when i ate my new lunch pot with added brown rice i found i wasn’t hungry again at all, whereas when i have eaten white rice in the past i have found myself hungry within an hour or so. There is something to that i think?

Brown rice has 3.32g of fibre per 1 cup, whereas white rice has only 0.75g. Besides i like the taste of brown rice, white rice unless you do something with it has no taste at all, that’s my opinion. There are lots of nutritional advice on the Internet which is usually due to some minute study of one thing or another. The problem with these studies is that they are minuscule in the number of people involved or they are carried out by companies who want you to buy their product, no matter what it is and the problem is most of us are gullible enough to follow what they are telling us – like lambs or is that lemmings?

Personally i would say try out brown rice for yourself and see what you think.

I had no idea at all what i rice plant looked like, so i thought others would like to know too – maybe?