Artificial rice facts for kids

Artificial rice is a special type of grain product that looks just like regular rice. It's often made from broken pieces of rice, sometimes mixed with other grains. A cool thing about artificial rice is that it's often made stronger with extra micronutrients. These are tiny but important nutrients like minerals (such as iron and zinc) and vitamins (like vitamin A and vitamin B). Adding these nutrients helps people get enough of what their bodies need to stay healthy.

How Artificial Rice is Made

Making artificial rice involves special machines. These machines can take broken rice or other ingredients and shape them into tiny pellets that look exactly like rice grains.

Adding nutrients to rice can be tricky. If you just sprinkle them on, they might wash away when the rice is rinsed or cooked. To solve this, a method called hot extrusion is used. In this process, rice flour and the extra nutrients are mixed and then pushed through a machine that shapes them into rice-like grains. This way, the vitamins and minerals are locked inside the rice, so they don't get lost when you wash or cook it.

NutriRice: Rice with Extra Goodness

NutriRice is a type of fortified rice that uses the hot extrusion method. It helps fight "hidden hunger," which is when people don't get enough important vitamins and minerals, even if they eat enough food. NutriRice can be packed with many different nutrients, like vitamin A, B vitamins, iron, and zinc.

Research on NutriRice

Studies have shown that rice made with the hot extrusion method is really good. It stays strong when washed, lasts a long time on the shelf, cooks well, looks like regular rice, and has a good texture. This method makes fortified rice that looks and feels very much like natural rice after it's cooked.

NutriRice at Dandelion Middle School

In 2008, a special project happened at the Dandelion Middle School in Beijing, China. This school is for children of migrant workers. For eight months, all 600 students at the school were given NutriRice. During this time, the problems caused by poor nutrition were cut in half! This helped the students become much healthier, reaching the same health level as average kids in the city.

Ultra Rice: A Healthy Solution

Ultra Rice is another type of grain product that looks like rice but is packed with extra vitamins and nutrients. It was created by the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH). Ultra Rice is designed to be a helpful food supplement in places where people might not easily get all the nutrients they need for good health.

How Ultra Rice Was Developed

Dr. James P. Cox and his wife Jeanne developed Ultra Rice over 20 years, starting in the 1960s. They wanted to use broken rice grains, which were often wasted, to create a super-nutritious instant rice. Their goal was to help fight hunger around the world.

They wanted to make a food that people would recognize as rice. It also needed to be easy to cook quickly, even with simple methods, and still keep its shape. The rice was designed to have extra protein and important vitamins like vitamin A and vitamin D.

The process they developed was a bit expensive to use. So, they eventually gave their invention to PATH, which then made Ultra Rice available to many people starting in 2005. Ultra Rice grains look like regular milled rice in size, shape, and color. But they are actually made from rice flour, added nutrients, and special ingredients that keep the nutrients fresh.

How Ultra Rice is Used

Most Ultra Rice products are made to be mixed with regular white rice. Usually, you mix one part Ultra Rice with 100 parts of white rice. It's designed to taste, smell, and feel as much like regular rice as possible.

Ultra Rice was first used in countries like Brazil, Colombia, and India. Now, through partnerships with groups like World Vision, it's planned to be used in many other developing countries that receive help.

Research on Ultra Rice

Scientists have studied how well the vitamins in Ultra Rice stay strong during storage. They found that ingredients like ascorbate, saturated fat, and antioxidants helped keep vitamin A safe, even in humid places. Another study showed that vitamin A losses would stop after six months, and they could even predict how much vitamin A would be lost during cooking.

Not getting enough vitamin A can cause night blindness. A study in 2005 showed that 348 pregnant Nepali women who ate Ultra Rice had better night vision. This improvement was similar to what they would get from eating vitamin A from other sources like liver, carrots, or green leafy vegetables.

Another study in Mexico looked at 180 women who were breastfeeding. It showed that a type of iron in Ultra Rice helped reduce iron deficiency anemia by 80% and general iron deficiency by 29%.

Taste tests have shown that most people can't tell the difference between regular rice and Ultra Rice. Many reports confirm that there's no big difference in how people prefer the taste of Ultra Rice compared to regular rice.

Ultra Rice Partners

After PATH created Ultra Rice, many other groups started helping to make it, give it out, and check how well it worked. Ultra Rice is usually made in the country where it will be used.

Organizations like the Department of Biotechnology (India), the Ministry of Agriculture (Brazil), the Universidade Federal de Viçosa (Brazil), and the University of Toronto (Canada) helped with the research and development of Ultra Rice.

In India, groups like the Akshaya Patra Foundation and the Naandi Foundation help carry out the Ultra Rice Project. Other global groups like the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, World Vision, and World Food Programme have also created programs to use Ultra Rice.

The Ultra Rice project received money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Other Grains

Corn Rice

In North Korea, an artificial "corn rice" called Okssal (옥쌀) or Gangnagssal (강낭쌀) is made from maize (corn). It's also quite popular in the Philippines, where people use it as a cheaper choice instead of white rice.

Konjac Rice

Konjac rice was created for people who want to eat fewer calories.

Plastic Rice Rumours

Sometimes, there have been stories in the news about rice made from plastic being sold as real rice. In India, this was even mentioned in a court case, but the reports were never proven true. In December 2016, there was a report that 2.5 tonnes of plastic rice were found in Nigeria. However, a few weeks later, after testing, a spokesperson for the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Health said that the material was just like real rice and there was no proof of plastic rice in the country. Later, it was announced that the seized rice was actually contaminated with bacteria. Fake rice stories also appeared on social media in the Philippines.

In 2017, similar rumours about plastic rice spread in Gambia and Ghana, but these were also not confirmed. The Ghana Food and Drugs Authority investigated and found that the samples thought to be fake rice were not actually plastic.

Snopes, a website that checks if urban legends are true, looked into these reports. They concluded that these stories were either hoaxes or unproven. They pointed out that plastic rice grains would be easy to spot after cooking, and it would probably cost more to make plastic rice than real rice. Some reasons suggested for why these "myths" keep spreading include people wanting to protect local products and not trusting things from other countries. Sometimes, fake videos are even used on purpose to support locally grown rice.

See Also

• Rice
• Food fortification