It’s the toast of the town.
A hot hack for cutting calories from starchy foods like rice and bread — without having to shrink portion size — has some TikTokkers saying it’s the best thing since sliced bread.
Dubbed by one cooking enthusiast as an “Asian mom secret,” the toasty tip involves cooking starchy food, cooling or freezing it and then reheating it.
The chemical process — called starch retrogradation — has the starch molecules reforming into a more compact, crystalline structure upon cooling.
While it doesn’t significantly cut calories, this move can help control appetite because the digestible starch is converted into a resistant starch, which resists digestion in the small intestine.
Instead, it moves to the large intestine, where it’s fermented by gut bacteria.
This leads to a slower, more moderate release of glucose into the bloodstream, helping to maintain stable blood sugar levels, and a better gut microbiome because the resistant starch acts like a prebiotic nourishing “good” bacteria in the large intestine.
Dr. Karan Rangarajan, a UK-based surgeon also known as Dr. Karan Raj, is a big proponent.
“If you take a slice of white bread and then freeze it, and then defrost it and toast it again, you could lower the glycemic Index of the bread by almost double,” he explained in one video.
The glycemic index measures how quickly a food raises blood sugar.
“This all happens because more retrograded starch is formed, and retrograded starch is a type of resistant starch, which is beneficial for your gut health because it acts more like a fiber,” Rangarajan added.
You could try this with complex carbs like white bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, oats and legumes such as lentils and beans.
Simple carbs, like sugar-filled snacks, don’t work.
“On average, resistant starch has a little more than half the calories per gram than regular starch,” Kristine Dilley, a registered dietitian at the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center, wrote last year.
“Per gram, resistant starch has about 2.5 calories versus 4 calories per gram in regular starches.”
She recommends refrigerating the starch for at least 24 hours.
Also, be sure to follow proper storage and reheating techniques, since poor handling and reheating of leftovers can cause food poisoning from bacteria.
If you don’t want to go through all that to cut a few calories, grab whole grain, sprouted grain or sourdough breads instead of white bread.
“Repeated heating and cooling cycles, and chilling for longer periods of time, can significantly increase resistant starch content,” Helen Tieu, a registered dietitian nutritionist and founder of Diet Redefined in Canada, told Fox News Digital this week.
“But bread choice, portion size and what you eat it with matter much more.”
