Eating brown rice rather than white rice will lower your risk for Type 2 diabetes according to a report by Dr. Qi Sun of the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
From a Reuters report on the brown rice vs. white rice study by Dr. Sun and his fellow researchers:
The Boston team assessed rice intake and diabetes risk among nearly 40,000 men and more than 157,000 women in three long-running studies of doctors and nurses. Altogether, 10,507 of them developed type 2 diabetes during follow up.
Across all three studies, having more white rice in the diet was associated with an elevated risk of type 2 diabetes, the researchers report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
When they pooled the data and took into account various diet and lifestyle factors that might influence the results, the doctors and nurses who ate the most white rice (at least 5 servings per week) had a significant 17 percent higher risk of developing diabetes than those who ate the least white rice (less than 1 serving a month).
In contrast, eating 2 or more servings of brown rice each week, as opposed to less than 1 serving a month, was associated with an 11 percent reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Again, this was after accounting for other diet and lifestyle factors that might influence the results. The protective effect seen for higher brown rice consumption was “not dramatic, albeit significant,” Sun said.
The researchers estimate that replacing one third of a serving of white rice daily (about 50 grams) with the same amount of brown rice could lower a person’s risk of getting type 2 diabetes by 16 percent. They further estimate that replacing white rice with whole grains as a group could be associated with a risk reduction as great as 36 percent.
