If you’re struggling to lose weight, could chilling your carbs help?

Online influencers claim the secret to low-calorie rice, pasta, and potatoes may be as simple as chilling out. Are they right? Not quite. But a small yet solid body of science does suggest that chilling these carbohydrate-rich foods after cooking them still could help people slim down. Most of the carbohydrates in these foods come from starch, of which there are two types: hard-to-digest amylose and easily digested amylopectin. Most raw carbohydrates, like uncooked potatoes, are made mostly of the hard-to-digest starch or resistant starch, but cooking converts it into the easily digested one. This is why diabetics need to be mindful when eating starchy foods. But many influencers believe that chilling those cooked foods triggers “retrogradation,” a process that converts easily digested starch back into resistant starch, making it harder to digest even if the food is then reheated. What does that mean for calories and blood sugar? Multiple studies since 2015 have found that people who ate rice that was cooked and then cooled had sometimes significantly lower blood sugar levels after eating compared to people who ate freshly cooked rice. Those findings are generally well-accepted. Less studied is whether retrogradation also reduces the calories available from these foods. Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital, said, “It doesn’t appreciably change the calorie content of that food, (but) it may well affect your hormones and metabolism in a way that makes controlling calories a lot easier.” Eating foods high in resistant starch reduces the surge in blood sugar typically seen after consuming cooked carbohydrates, he explained. And that’s key not only for diabetics. Studies have shown that those sugar spikes activate the brain’s reward mechanism and trigger cravings, making overeating at snacks and later meals more likely. Also, those blood sugar surges increase the body’s production of insulin, which not only makes us feel hungry but prompts the body’s metabolism to store more calories as fat, Ludwig said. “When the food retrogrades, it digests more slowly,” he said. “It’s going to keep your blood sugar more stable. You’ll have less insulin to drive fat storage and likely have an easier time avoiding overeating.” This article was provided by The Associated Press.