How many calories in 2 cups of uncooked White Rice

Rice is made up of digestible starch and a special type of carbohydrate called resistant starch, which recent research suggests may be key for weight control. Humans don’t have the enzymes to digest resistant starch, so it isn’t transformed into sugar and absorbed quickly in the bloodstream like digestible starch. Instead, it bypasses the small intestine and is metabolized in the colon, where it’s fermented into short-chain fatty acids that feed healthy colonies of gut bacteria. The more resistant starch a food has, the fewer calories from that starch our bodies will absorb. Resistant starch is plentiful in foods like legumes, beans, whole grains, uncooked potatoes and unripe bananas.

Researchers from the College of Chemical Sciences in Sri Lanka wanted to figure out if they could convert some of rice’s digestible starch into the non-digestible type, and thereby make it less caloric. By testing out 38 different kinds of rice and simulating human digestion in a test tube, they devised a recipe for the least caloric way to cook rice: drop a teaspoon of coconut oil into boiling water, then add half a cup of non-fortified white rice and cook it for about 40 minutes. After cooking, stick it in the fridge for 12 hours.

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Rice cooked this way had at least 10 times the resistant starch as normally prepared rice and 10-15% fewer calories. But researchers think that with certain kinds of rice, the method could cut calories by 50-60%.

Here’s how it works: the glucose units in hot cooked rice have a loose structure, but when it cools down, the molecules rearrange themselves into very tight bonds that are more resistant to digestion, says Pushaparaja Thavarajah, PhD, who supervised the study. Scientists already know that it works in potatoes, but in the new study, researchers thought that adding a fat like coconut oil could add extra protection. It seemed to. The fat molecule wedges its way into the rice, Thavarajah says, and provides a barrier against quick digestion.

Making rice starch more resistant has other perks besides cutting calories. It’ll also feed your good bacteria. “The resistant starch is a very good substrate, or energy source, for the bacteria inside the human gut,” says Thavarajah.

Best of all, the researchers found that reheating the rice didn’t change the levels of resistant starch—so the calorie hack is safe for leftovers, too.

It seems like a simple question: how many calories are there in a cup of rice? It is a simple question, but the answer is a bit tricky. Cup size, rice type, the condition of the rice (cooked/uncooked/method of cooking) and much more, change the answer!

Contents Show

1 Calories in a Cup of Uncooked Rice

2 1 Cup of Cooked Rice Calories

3 Rice Varieties have Different Nutrition

4 Cooked versus Uncooked Rice Calories

5 Cooking Method affects Digestible Calories

6 Weight of Rice in a Cup

7 Best to Use a Food Scale

7.1 Related:

Calories in a Cup of Uncooked Rice

Starting with uncooked rice: one cup of uncooked, white, medium grain rice contains 729 calories, equivalent to 3061 kilojoules. That’s because there are 354 calories in 100 grams of rice, and a cup of rice weighs 206 grams.

1 Cup of Cooked Rice Calories

Since you’re probably not going to eat uncooked rice, let’s take a look at the cooked version. Remember that 1 cup of cooked white rice weighs 196 grams. Thus, a cup of cooked, medium-grained, white rice contains 313 calories, or 1315 kilojoules.

Rice Varieties have Different Nutrition

Even though there are over 40,000 different varieties of rice, each with its own nutritional profile, we just need to know a few key points about the rice we’re measuring. Long grain rice has fewer calories than short grain rice (339 calories/100g compared to 356 calories/100g). Medium grain rice is, predictably in the middle. Less processed rice like brown and red rice has fewer calories than white rice. For this post, we are assuming that the question is related to a cup of white medium grain rice.

Cooked versus Uncooked Rice Calories

Cooking drastically changes the per-weight calorie count of rice. In addition to changing the physical and chemical structure of rice, cooking by boiling or steaming adds lots of water to each grain of rice. This makes the rice bigger, so that one cup of uncooked rice yields up to three cups of cooked rice. The amount of water absorbed mainly depends on cooking time, cooking temperature, relative atmospheric humidity and pressure (the weather!), the type of water, and of course the type of rice. In every case, cooked rice has far fewer calories than uncooked rice on a weight for weight basis.

Cooking Method affects Digestible Calories

As we explained in our post on reducing starch in rice, the method of cooking affects the amount of digestible (nutritionally useful) calories in rice. Adding oil to cooking rice may reduce the amount of calories able to be absorbed by your body, even whilst increasing the actual calorie count! The amount of calories your body will actually draw from rice (or any other food) is impossible to know without complicated scientific methods and equipment.

Weight of Rice in a Cup

Somewhere, perhaps in Plato’s mystical world of forms, there exists a perfectly-sized 250ml capacity cup. However, that cup is not in our (nor, probably, your) kitchen. Even with a proper measuring cup (the type with lines), it is practically impossible to measure exactly one cup of rice. There will always be a slightly different weight of rice. That said, the average cup of uncooked medium grain white rice weighs 206 grams. A cup of white, medium grain boiled rice weighs 196 grams.

Best to Use a Food Scale

The thing about using a cup to measure rice, is that it is highly inaccurate. It is possible to squeeze double the amount of cooked rice into a cup. Even shaking the cup to rearrange the grains will change how much rice you can measure. It is just as easy to count a three-quarter full cup of uncooked rice as a full one. And, that’s before even considering what size of cup you’re using!

If you want to get a meaningfully accurate estimate of the calories in your rice, it is best to use a food scale! Now, find out what happens if you stop eating rice altogether!

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