Dr. Betty Kamen, Ph.D.

Access to the latest developments in nutritional therapies and natural health alternatives.

Introducing Stabilized Rice Bran

About ten thousand years ago, people in various parts of the world began to grow their own food. They gave up their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and became farmers, cultivating cereal grains like wheat and barley.

The reasons for this change are still unclear. A case can be made that the transition to agriculture resulted in a serious drop in the quality of life, and that agricultural society was only sustained because the alternatives at the time were even less desirable. It can be presumed that the cereal grains themselves had always played a role - although probably a minor role - in the pre-agricultural diet.

But there was an important difference: For thousands of years, cereal grains had been eaten as they grew in the wild, foraged by Paleolithic epicures who sought the young sprouts as sweet vegetables, and the kernels as tasty nutty snacks.

With cultivation and storage, cereals began to be consumed as a grain rather than as sweet leafy plants or fresh seeds. What's more, the first genetically modified foods were developed about 8,000 years ago, when human intervention created hybrid wheat. These "modern" wheats differ in chromosome content from the wild, naturally occurring grains, and are believed to be the result of deliberate cross-breeding efforts. The yields of these "new" wheat varieties are much higher, but the nutritional consequences are still a question. Meanwhile, wheat and other ceral grains have come to dominate the modern North American diet.

How Civilization Began

It has even been suggested - by very credible researchers with good science behind their research - that the dominance of wheat, and to a lesser extent dairy products, can be at least partially attributed to the low levels of opiates that they contain. It's the ultimate "comfort food."

The Addictive Properties of Wheat and Milk

Rice cultivation in Asia began about 7,000 years ago. But the problem with cultivated cereal grains - and especially rice - is what happens to the rice after harvesting. The basic "advantage" of agriculture is that it allows a large quantity of grain to be planted over a large area of land, and then harvested and stored. This provides a reliable and continuous food supply for the clan, tribe, village, or city.

But whole rice has a very serious shelf-life problem. There is a natural enzyme called lipase in the rice bran that causes the oil to become rancid. When the rice is growing, the lipase and the oil are isolated from each other, in separate types of cells. However, as soon as any mechanical processing occurs - such as when the rice is hulled or when the bran is removed from the kernel in the process of "polishing" white rice - the cell walls are ruptured and lipase meets rice bran oil. From there it only takes a few hours for the fragile components of the oil to become oxidized and rancid.

Seven thousand years ago the solution was simple: Mill the rice to remove the hull and the bran, leaving only the white kernel underneath. Now we have long shelf-life, but we've also removed most of the nutrients that our bodies rely on.

Look at what's being thrown away in rice bran:

Gamma Oryzanol, beta sitosteryl ferluate, and five other related compounds. These are potent antioxidants and trace nutrients that play a vital role in so many aspects of human physiology that they suggest a symbiotic relationship between fresh rice and humans. Gamma oryzanol is found only in rice bran.

Tocopherals and tocotrienols, at least eight different varieties. These are all types of Vitamin E, although commercial vitamin E supplements are usually in the form of alpha-tocopheral. The importance of the others is probably at least equal to that of the alpha form.

Polyphenols including ferulic acit, alpha-lipoic acid, and four others. Lipoic acid is believed to play an important role in sugar metabolism at the cellular level.

The metal chelators magnesium, calcium, and phosphorous. Also manganese and other trace minerals,

Phytosterols, including beta sitosterol, campesterol, stigmasterol, and at least eleven more. These are the trace nutrients that help explain why fresh vegetables are so good for you.

Carotenoids, including beta-carotene, alpha carotene, lycopene, lutein, zeazanthin, and more. Although beta-carotene is commonly sold as a single-ingredient supplement, alpha-carotene may in fact be more important. Lycopene is responsible for some of the recent health claims relating to tomatoes.

Essential amino acids including tryptophan, histidine, methionine, cystein, cystine, and argenine.

Nine B-vitamins, polysaccharides, and phospholipids. Phospholipids are vital to maintaining healthy cell membranes.

Lecithin (phosphatidyl choline and phosphatidyl serine).

Seven identified enzymes, including coenzyme Q10 and superoxidase dismutase.

The bulk, or macro-nutrients - carbohydrates, starch, sugars - are still there in white rice, of course, so the tummy feels full. But white rice is a nutritional wasteland.

What about brown rice? Brown rice is brown because a layer of rice bran is left in place. But the hulling process still causes enough disruption to release lipase into the bran. The result is that virtually all brown rice contains rancid oils to some degree. The long-held belief that brown rice is nutritionally superior to white rice is suddenly called into question.

On a global scale, most of the world's calories now come from cereal grains, and most of the nutrients in cereal grains are thrown away with the bran. So the big change in our food environment that began 10,000 years ago is the large-scale elimination of dietary trace nutrients.

This trend has accelerated dramatically in the last century, and especially in recent decades. Food is stripped down to a few macro-nutrients, while the complex array of micro-nutrients and subtle trace elements is discarded.

Many of these micronutrients have known functions in human physiology, but many more do not. These unidentified cofactors are the strongest argument for using concentrated natural food products as nutritional supplements, rather than those based on isolated "active ingredients."

Have our bodies had time to adapt to this slow but devastating change in the quality of our food? Even the regular use of fire for cooking, believed to have begun about 125,000 years ago, may have occurred too late for our gene pool to have learned to deal with the witch's brew of carcinogenic combustion products and oxidized fat that comes along with food cooked over an open flame.

The answer is clear in the case of cereal cereal grains: No, our bodies are not designed for this kind of abuse. Compared to the diet of any healthy animal still living in the wild, people eat a diet that is "abnormal and exotic, driven by style and economics," as the director of a British cancer research institute recently remarked.

The challenge we face is to return our food environment to something that more closely resembles what our bodies are designed to thrive on. We could do this easily enough by mimicking the Paleolithic food supply: All meat fresh-killed game animals, all vegetables picked right off the vine, all fruit picked from wild trees. No refrigeration, no containers, and possibly even no cooking. Are you ready? We're not, even if it was actually possible to do that in safety in 21st Century North America.

The Paleolithic Diet Page

So we are led to a certain category of food supplement. Not the isolated vitamins and minerals that take up most of the space on health store shelves, but certain specialized foods that restore some of the many elements that have been stripped from our modern diet. These are often called nutraceuticals, adaptogens, or functional foods. Blue-green algae, colostrum, ginseng, probiotic bacteria, velvet deer antler, medicinal mushrooms, and vegetable juices can all fall into one or more of these loosely defined categories.

Rice bran does too. It has probably been used as a nutraceutical for as long as rice has been gown. Even in modern India, it's not uncommon for the mother of a sick child to collect some fresh bran from rice polishings to use for making a therapeutic tea for a sick child. But the bran has to be very fresh, or it's worthless. Because it's been so hard to stabilize this nutrient-rich food, millions of tons of it are discarded or sold for low-grade animal feed every year.

This situation has dramatically changed, and food supplements derived from stabilized rice bran are showing enormous therapeutic value.

Here's how rice bran stabilization works:

The lipase enzyme in rice bran is responsible for quickly turning the oil rancid. But this enzyme is somewhat delicate, and is destroyed or denatured by heat. However, too much heat destroys the nutrients in the bran, defeating the purpose of stabilization in the first place. Too much heat also destroys antioxidants, removing several important natural preservatives and protective mechanisms. That's why bran stabilized at a low temperature can have a longer shelf-life than bran stabilized at a higher temperature, even though the higher temperature is more likely to have denatured all of the lipase.

NutraCea , a new nutraceutical company near Sacramento, California, is the exclusive marketer of stabilized rice bran products under license from the RiceX Compagy. RiceX has created a process that reliably denatures the lipase in rice bran without causing very much damage to the rest of the food's chemistry. This is done with a mechanical extrusion process - forcing the somewhat ductile grain to deform as it squeezes through small openings in a metal die. The high rate of sheer deformation during extrusion causes just the right amount of internal heating for just the right amount of time.

A number of other variables have to be carefully controlled, and some of the processes involved are proprietary trade secrets. The result is a stabilized rice bran product that retains most of the vital nutrients of fresh rice bran, but has a shelf life measured in years rather than hours.

Stabilized rice bran is available in several forms, with various ratios of soluble to insolube components and other nutraceutical additives. They all share the surprisingly pleasant nutty taste of fresh rice bran, and the safety of a food that's been used by humans for thousands of years.

Why are the antioxidants in rice bran so important? Why is oxygen so bad? Isn't oxygen vital for life?

Oxygen and Antioxidants

Life on earth began in an oxygen-free environment, and the design of our cells still reflects this heritage. The structures within our cells that take advantage of oxygen's reactive power to produce energy are carefully isolated from the other parts of the cell that might be severely damaged by oxygen.

The History of Oxygen on Planet Earth

Oxidation is also dangerous because one oxidized molecule can oxidize others, causing a kind of chain reaction. The result can be damaged proteins, impaired cell function, and reduced immunity. Some antioxidants are specialized to particular types of oxidative damage, while others work in conjunction with other antioxidants. Substitutions don't always work. We seem to require the same complex mix found in natural and fresh whole foods.

Stabilized rice bran is one of the most potent and accessible sources of this complex mix of antioxidants and micronutrients. Although it's a very new entrant in the nutraceutical field, it is rapidly accumulating an impressive body of positive results from laboratory research and clinical trials

Compelling case histories are becoming common. Some of the most promising uses are against diabetes, arthritis, peripheral neuropathy, high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. While the exact modes of action are often unclear, many of these chronic conditions have their indirect origins in oxidative damage. It is likely that the right antioxidant at the right time is what is really responsible for the broad-spectrum efficacy of stabilized rice bran.

Stabilized rice bran is one of the foods that will help reverse our civilization's 10,000 year decline in nutritional quality.

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