Sometimes I think people just overthink it. Stop eating food that is clearly junk, and enjoy all the health benefits.
It's not the people eating a chicken breast, mixed veggies and a side of rice who are obese and unhealthy.
I see people go through all sorts of rationalizations to eat a cookie, and then stress over the glycemic index of a bit of rice. Sigh.
But I suppose, your general assertion is fair. People who don't have a good sense of GI for food can't easily make some more complex decisions around food. For those people I tend to tell them to avoid processed ingredients. Anything that makes it easier for your body to digest, probably isn't helping with weight.
There are other factors -- dramaticaly increased affordability and abundance of food, and mass use of taste enhancers in food (such as sugar and salt) that make people overeat, but that's another story.
Edit: arsenic concentrations in rice has more to do with where the rice is geown than the type of rice. For example, I don't buy rice from Arkansas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#International_...
To bring it back to HN, switching rice types is optimizing an already fast function to make it a bit faster while leaving the obvious bottleneck untouched.
This is thought process is exactly what my earlier comments were addressing. Worrying about white rice when consuming cookies and soda all day. A person should worry about things like rice and fresh potatoes after getting rid of all the garbage from their diet.
But I didn't say that. In fact, I carefully qualified my statement, saying that the majority of the obesity problem is caused by junk food. And note, I never said brown rice is a "cure", I actually said it would help. The implication was clearly that by itself (without reducing a diet of processed foods and soft drinks), it's not going to be effective. I just can't fathom how you got "cure" out of my comment.
You know, I'm getting a bit tired of commenting here on HN if this is the sort of conversation I'm going to have, where I'm cautious about making sweeping and unsupported statements, and where I take pains to qualify my comments so that people don't get the wrong idea. It's too bad that no matter how much I try to head such comments off at the pass, someone will reply reflexively without reading carefully.
> But if they switched to brown rice it would help a lot.
I don't think changing rice colors is going to help at all if they are eating like crap. That was my point. White/brown rice is the least problematic part of their diet.
If you were implying that cleaning up the rest of their diet and then switching rice would help, then yeah we are in agreement.
See that's a much better line of reasoning than the one I was objecting to.
As for obesity in Asia. My main question there would be total calories intake. I mean you can stay thin on McDonalds if you calorie count it...
Fructose. HFCS. Sucrose. Enriched wheat flour. Polished white rice. Potato.
Basically, anything with a high glycemic index and little nutritional value beyond the carbohydrate macronutrient.
I personally start putting weight on very quickly with even pretty minimal amounts of carb, natural or processed. My wife is more tolerant of processed carbs, and in fact needs more natural carbs than I can personally tolerate.
Come to think of it, this probably applies to more than just food.