Oats have higher calories than rice, so why do we eat oats and rice to lose weight?

Oats and naked oats actually belong to the same type of plant, both are oats. However, most of the oats cultivated abroad are hulled oats (oats with lemma husk), while the oats grown in western China are naked oats, which are different varieties. Both oats and buckwheat can be eaten whole. Why do we still eat oats if they have more calories than rice?

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Before cooking with oats, always soak them in water. Because the surface texture of oats is particularly dense, it is difficult for water to penetrate into it. It is best to soak it overnight before putting it into the rice cooker to achieve a good taste. When the weather is hot, soaking at room temperature will easily change the taste, so it is recommended to soak in the refrigerator.

If you grind off a thin layer of the oatmeal skin and make it into ground oatmeal rice, it will absorb water more easily and can be cooked directly without soaking.

It should be noted that the glucan in oats has strong water absorption and evaporates a lot of water, so more water needs to be added than when cooking rice.

For example, when cooking rice in an electric rice cooker, you only need to add 1.5 kilograms of water to 1 kilogram of rice, but oatmeal rice requires more than 2 or even 3 times the amount of water to make it softer. When cooking rice in an electric pressure cooker, there is no need to add several times the amount of water because there is no problem of water evaporation.

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Grinding oats into powder can make oats noodles. People in the Northwest use oatmeal noodles to make oat fish, oat nests, oat rolls, oat noodles and many other Northwest-style delicacies with unique tastes.

Nowadays, cooked oat noodle rolls are often sold in the staple food kitchens of many supermarkets in Beijing. They can be eaten immediately or steamed and added with various shredded or chopped vegetables and poured with your favorite noodle sauce, such as tomato and egg sauce, eggplant and minced meat sauce, mushroom and chicken sauce, etc., and eaten as a staple food.

Judging from the measurement data we have seen so far, the nutritional value of domestic buckwheat is not inferior to that of oats, and is even better in terms of certain health-related ingredient indicators. Various whole-grain snacks made from pure oatmeal also slowly raise blood sugar levels after meals.

Oats have higher calories than rice, so why should we eat them to lose weight?

Because of their high protein content, high dietary fiber content, dense tissue structure, and high viscosity brought by beta-glucan, these factors work together to make oats and naked oats slowly digested and absorbed, resulting in a strong sense of fullness and a slow rise in blood sugar after meals. Therefore, using them as staple food can help people control blood sugar and they are also suitable for people who want to lose weight.

Of course, slow digestion does not mean no digestion. Most of the nutrients are released slowly and gradually absorbed by the human body. If the food is digested too quickly like rice and white flour, the blood sugar will rise wildly after half an hour, which will promote the synthesis of triglycerides (meaning it makes the body easy to gain fat); after three hours, the blood sugar will drop, and the person will become hungry again, which is not conducive to controlling the amount of food for the next meal.

The dense structure of whole oatmeal grains can slow down digestion. However, if oats are processed into instant food products, their dense structure is destroyed and beta-glucan is the main factor that slows down the digestion and absorption. Therefore, when choosing oatmeal products, it is advisable to choose products with high beta-glucan content.