by Uma Shankari

Created on: October 08, 2009

Brown rice is a complex carbohydrate that provides 15 essential nutrients, including B-vitamins, niacin and potassium. In the olden days, paddy used to be hand pounded and winnowed to remove the husk and consumed as such. Nowadays whole rice is milled minimally to remove the husk to get the brown rice. The brown rice is processed further to remove the bran and most of the germ layer and polished still further to get white rice. Polishing removes the layer that is filled with health-supportive, essential fats that make rice highly susceptible to oxidation. Though this extends the shelf life of the product, the resulting rice is simply a refined starch that is largely deprived of its original nutrients.

Brown rice is every weight watcher's dream food. A common sense approach to obesity control is to eat foods that have low glycemic index (GI), like raw vegetables and fruits and whole grains. If you have been eating for years a low-fat, high GI carbohydrate diet based on refined flour, chances are that you have become at least partially insulin resistant.

High GI foods break down faster, and produce sugar spikes that compel the pancreas to produce large amounts of insulin. Insulin maintains stable blood sugar levels by telling the body's cells when to absorb glucose from the bloodstream. Being insulin resistant means your body stops responding to insulin, and instead deposits every calorie as fat.

By metabolizing slowly and maintaining stable levels of blood sugar and/or serotonin, brown rice snips away food cravings. By contrast, processed food releases a short burst of serotonin, but soon returns to low-serotonin state and causes cravings for more sugar and simple carbohydrates.

Brown rice has antioxidants and phytonutrients that boosts the immune system, lowers cholesterol, reduces risk of heart disease, stroke and colon cancer, and reduces severity of asthma.

Brown rice can substantially reduce the risk of colon cancer, as it is a a very good source of selenium, a trace mineral that induces DNA repair and synthesis in damaged cells and inhibits the proliferation of cancer cells. Selenium is an antioxidant and is essential for thyroid hormone metabolism and immune function.

Selenium plays a critical role in cancer prevention as a cofactor of glutathione peroxidase, which is one of the body's most powerful antioxidant enzymes and is used in the liver to detoxify a wide range of potentially harmful molecules. When levels of glutathione peroxidase are too low,

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