Removing starch from rice does reduce its carbohydrate content, but the amount depends entirely on your method. Simply rinsing rice under the tap before cooking washes away a thin layer of surface starch and has a minimal effect on total carbs. More aggressive techniques, like boiling rice in excess water and draining it (the “pasta method”) or using a carb-reducing rice cooker, can cut total carbohydrates by roughly 19 to 20%.
What Rinsing Actually Removes
When you rinse rice before cooking, you’re washing off loose starch dust that sits on the surface of each grain. This surface material is created during milling, when grains rub against each other and shed fine starch particles. The starch that leaches into the rinse water has a different molecular structure than the starch locked inside each grain, but the total quantity is small. Rinsing changes the texture of your cooked rice (less sticky, more separate grains) far more than it changes the nutritional profile. If your goal is meaningfully fewer carbs, rinsing alone won’t get you there.
The Pasta Method and Carb-Reducing Cookers
A more effective approach is cooking rice in a large volume of water, then draining the starchy liquid away, similar to how you’d cook pasta. Carb-reducing rice cookers automate this process: they cook the rice in excess water, separate the starchy liquid, then finish steaming the rice in a second compartment.
Lab testing of rice prepared this way showed a drop from 34 grams of carbohydrate per 100 grams of cooked rice down to about 27.6 grams, a 19% reduction. Calories dropped by 20%, falling from 149 to roughly 121 per 100-gram serving. That’s a real difference. For a typical bowl of rice (around 200 grams cooked), you’d save about 13 grams of carbohydrate and 56 calories.
Blood sugar testing backed this up. People who ate the reduced-carb rice had significantly lower blood glucose spikes in the first 15 and 30 minutes after eating compared to those who ate rice cooked the standard way, with no notable difference in how full or satisfied they felt afterward.
Why the Reduction Tops Out Around 20%
Rice is roughly 80% starch by dry weight, and most of that starch is tightly packed inside each grain in a crystalline structure. Water can dissolve and carry away some of the starch that loosens during cooking, but the majority stays bound within the grain’s cell walls. No amount of rinsing or boiling in excess water will turn rice into a low-carb food. You’re trimming the edges, not transforming the product.
The type of rice matters too. Rice varieties differ in how much of their starch is made up of two key components: one that forms straight chains (amylose) and one that forms branched chains (amylopectin). Long-grain varieties like basmati tend to have higher amylose content, around 20 to 26%, which makes their starch less soluble and less likely to leach out. Short-grain and sticky rice varieties have more of the branched type, which dissolves more readily into cooking water. In practice, stickier rice varieties may lose slightly more starch to rinsing and draining, but the overall carb reduction remains modest regardless of variety.
Cooling Rice: A Different Approach
There’s another way to reduce how much carbohydrate your body actually absorbs from rice, and it doesn’t involve removing starch at all. When cooked rice cools down, some of its starch reorganizes into a tightly packed form that your digestive enzymes can’t break down. This is called resistant starch, and your body treats it more like fiber than like a typical carbohydrate.
Fresh cooked rice contains about 7.5 grams of resistant starch per 100 grams. After cooling in the refrigerator, that number rises to nearly 12 grams per 100 grams, an increase of about 60%. In a clinical trial with people who have type 1 diabetes, eating cooled rice produced significantly lower peak blood sugar levels (9.9 vs. 11 mmol/L) and a dramatically smaller overall blood sugar response compared to freshly cooked rice. The total area under the blood sugar curve dropped by roughly 60%.
One important finding from that same trial: participants who didn’t adjust their insulin dose experienced more episodes of low blood sugar after eating the cooled rice. The cooled rice was so much less glycemically active that their usual insulin dose was too aggressive. If you use insulin, this is worth knowing and discussing with your care team. Reheating cooled rice does reverse some of the resistant starch formation, but not all of it, so even leftover rice that’s been microwaved retains some benefit.
Combining Methods for the Biggest Effect
You can stack these techniques. Cook rice in excess water, drain off the starchy liquid, then refrigerate the cooked rice before eating it (or reheating it). The draining removes soluble starch physically, and the cooling converts some of the remaining starch into a form your body can’t digest. Together, you’re likely reducing the effective digestible carbohydrate by more than either method alone, though no single study has measured the exact combined figure.
For context, a standard serving of white rice cooked the normal way contains about 34 grams of carbohydrate per 100 grams. Using a carb-reducing method brings that to about 28 grams. Cooling could further reduce the digestible portion by converting several additional grams into resistant starch. You’re still eating a high-carb food, but one that behaves more gently in your bloodstream. If your goal is blood sugar management rather than strict carb counting, these techniques offer a meaningful and practical advantage.