Scientists have just found an easy way to make rice healthier and a lot less fattening. A cup of the cooked grain has about 200 calories, most of which comes in the form of starch, which turns into sugar, and often body fat. Researchers in Sri Lanka cut its calories by 50% with this new preparation method that changes the type of starch in the rice. When the water is boiling before adding the rice, they added coconut oil – about 3 percent of the weight of the rice in the pot. Then they cooked the rice normally, and let it cool in the fridge for 12 hours. After reheating it, up to half the calories are gone.

It works by converting the white rice—which made mostly of digestible starch—into starch that is indigestible, or “resistant.” Digestible starch is quickly turned into glucose and then glycogen which will add to our body fat if we don’t burn it off. Resistant starch on the other hand will eventually be excreted. There’s at least one other study which shows this could work with pasta as well.