The surprising reason you should be freezing your bread before toasting

It’s the toast of the town.A hot hack for cutting calories from starchy foods like rice and bread — without having to shrink portion size — has some TikTokkers saying it’s the best thing since sliced bread.Dubbed by one cooking enthusiast as an “Asian mom secret,” the toasty tip involves cooking starchy food, cooling or freezing it and then reheating it.The chemical process — called starch retrogradation — has the starch molecules reforming into a more compact, crystalline structure upon cooling.While it doesn’t significantly cut calories, this move can help control appetite because the digestible starch is converted into a resistant starch, which resists digestion in the small intestine.Instead, it moves to the large intestine, where it’s fermented by gut bacteria.This leads to a slower, more moderate release of glucose into the bloodstream, helping to maintain stable blood sugar levels, and a better gut microbiome because the resistant starch acts like a prebiotic nourishing “good” bacteria in the large intestine.Dr.Karan Rangarajan, a UK-based surgeon also known as Dr.

Karan Raj, is a big proponent.“If you take a slice of white bread and then freeze it, and then defrost it and toast it again, you could lower the glycemic Index of the bread by almost double,” he explained in one video.The glycemic index measures how quickly a food raises blood sugar.“This all happens because more retrograded starch is formed, and retrograded starch is a type of resistant starch, which is beneficial for your gut health because it acts more like a fiber,” Rangarajan added.You could try this with complex carbs like white bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, oats and legumes such as lentils and beans.Simple carbs, like sugar-filled snacks, don’t work.“On average, resistant starch has a little more than half the calories per gram than regular starch,” Kristine Dilley, a registered dietitian at the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center, wrote last year.“Per ...