Really.
White rice good . . . brown rice bad.
I mean . . . I always knew that from an emotional standpoint but it was nice to see it laid out scientifically.
Now I warn you, never believe 97% of the things you read on the internet, but the guy made a good point. (Of course it was a guy)
See, nutritionists have been touting brown rice both for it's fiber and for it's vegetable protein, not to mention that it must be better for you because it is unprocessed. Which . . . like . . . duh . . . fiber/protein/virginal . . . of course it must be better.
But wait . . . there's less.
Cause if you want fiber, it's much better to get it from dark leafy cruciferous stuff like broccoli spinach and kale. And if you want protein it's much better to get it from animal, unless you're not into that sort of thing, then it's much better to get it from beans which have much higher quantities and are more easily absorbed. As for processing, it's not like brown rice goes through the same process to become white rice, as a potato goes through to become a Pringle. The shell just gets squeezed off. Big whoop.
The biggest difference (the only measurable difference) is that your body doesn't digest the brown rice very well.
In conclusion, white rice is better.
In the Post Script, it's only better if you are needing to add calories to your diet because you're an athlete or a body builder. The rest of us are stuck with kale.
But seriously . . . how hard is it to get real information? Is it even remotely possible to get experts to agree on anything other than the blazingly obvious?
I kid you not, I just read an article the contradicted itself in less than three paragraphs.
The article was on the pancreas and thyroid and how they determine metabolic rate. Basically the article made a big stink between the two different types of metabolisms, Anabolism (to build and store), and Catabolism (to burn, baby, burn), and then proceeded to put them back together.
Jerk.
Right now, you're probably asking yourself, what the hell is this guy talking about?
Why am I reading this?
And the answer is where I get down to my point.
The point is is that when you get right down to it . . . there are no silver bullets.
Nothing really works.
(On and emotional/physical/work/life balance sorta way . . . my toaster oven works just fine.)
Even the metaphor of the silver bullet is ambiguous. I mean are we talking about killing werewolves or are we talking about the coolness of The Lone Ranger?
Probably the werewolves. But why them? Why not vampires and stinky garlic? Hell . . . why not Theseus and the Minotaur? Life is so much more like a labyrinth than Tonto's wild west.
Anyway . . .
The reason I was reading these articles in the first place is that I wanted to do two simple things this summer.
I wanna knock down that tire I got going around my middle, and I wanna put some meat on my son's bones.
Neither of those should be really difficult. The Blazingly Obvious Experts all agree that it's a simple question of calorie intake.
Less for me.
More for him.
Okay? Isn't that the way to go?
Sure . . . but you also have to remember that a bowl of strawberries isn't the same as a bowl of chocolate cake.
Okay . . . so now we're typecasting calories and you really shouldn't be eating cake in a bowl. But so far so good.
Okay except that your metabolic response to calories might differ.
I eat the strawberries and my body says "Mmmm Good. Let's pump some insulin and see if we can't figure out a way to save that glucose for later." Anabolism.
My son eats the strawberries and it's like pouring gasoline on a grease fire. You could put your hand on his chest after a wholesome meal and be concerned that he literally just swallowed Ginger Baker with a full drum kit and a three pound bag of uncut cocaine. Catabolic.
So . . . conceptually . . . I need to increase my catabolic rate, decrease my anabolic rate, and figure out how to do the exact opposite to my nine year old.
Only, the best way to increase the catabolic rate is to develop muscle mass and the best way to do that is to increase the anabolic rate to help build those muscles.
It gets worse and I'm gonna stop there, because we just hit the point where no one agrees, and we've only just tapped the nipple of the boob of the endocrine system. We haven't even got to the digestive or GOD FORBID, the nervous system.
The minotaur is easy.
It's the labyrinth that's gonna kill you.
I can see why it's perfectly logical to give up.
Let it all just play out with as little interference as possible. Eat, sleep, hustle for money and sex if such things are important to you, binge watch The Wire on HBOGo if they're not.
I'm on Episode 8.
But I'm not happy about it.
But I am shaved, and showered, and spent all morning researching and writing, in a few minutes I'm gonna go for a walk, and after that I'm gonna make myself a salad. In the afternoon I will write rehearse and then cook up a meal that will consist of chicken, broccoli, and kidney beans.
I'm still not convinced about the white rice.
But it's there if I change my mind.
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