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Drinking water from boiled rice
In the Far East, families drink the water they have boiled their rice in to stay healthy. Is there any virtue in us doing the same? I also throw away the split pea water and was wondering if I am wasting valuable nutrients there too?
Re-using vegetable water in soups, stocks, and gravies is an excellent way of boosting your intake of healthy nutrients. You can even, if you can find ways to disguise the flavour of say cabbage water, use these same liquors in fresh fruit and vegetable juices.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), practitioners aim to balance two types of energy; yin and yang and rice water is used to “tonify” yin. In this system of healing, common diseases linked to a yin deficiency include diabetes, hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) and infections from parasites, bacteria, viruses and fungi.
Toxins - including cigarettes, alcohol, and prescription drugs - are all said to deplete the yin energy; a situation which will be exacerbated by eating a diet of refined Western foods. TCM argues that a yin deficiency that is allowed to remain uncorrected will eventually burden the adrenal glands and kidneys, leaving the body more prone to infection and stress.
In the West, most people still believe brown rice to be healthier than the white variety but when Portuguese researchers compared the nutritional value of the two, they were surprised to discover that although brown rice does indeed have a higher nutritional content, there is no evidence that a brown rice diet is any healthier than a white rice one. The working theory is that brown rice may also contain anti-nutritional factors that have an adverse effect on the bioavailability of the nutrients in this cereal.