By Rainier Allan Ronda (The Philippine Star)

MANILA, Philippines - The so-called fake rice is not really bad for consumers, and might even be better than ordinary rice because it has lower glucose content, according to a University of the Philippines food scientist.

Ma. Concepcion Lizada, a Ph.D. and professor emeritus of Food Science in UP Diliman, said that the current controversy over the so-called fake rice was giving “fabricated rice” a bad reputation.

“I would rather call it fabricated rice. It’s giving fabricated rice a very bad reputation,” Lizada told her fellow scientists, academicians and researchers during an open forum at the two-day 37th Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM) of the National Academy of Science and Technology at the Manila Hotel yesterday.

“We actually have a commercial product now that is available widely in the market. They call it corned rice. In fact, there was a media blitz about the corned rice. It’s good. I tasted it myself,” Lizada said.

Lizada, who was a speaker on the first day of the 37th ASM yesterday giving a presentation on “Agriculture-Health Convergence: Synergy in Managing Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs),” said there was even a claim that the fabricated rice was better than ordinary rice.

“They claim that it’s glycaemic index,” Lizada said.

Lizada said that fabricated rice or corned rice was a product of food extrusion technology, which she discussed in her presentation as being tapped to fortify food staples.

“Remember exclusion technology involves gelatinization and therefore, if you gelatinize your amilose to a high extent, it becomes more available and therefore the glycaemic index must have been modified somehow,” Lizada said.

“But it’s available. It’s a good technology. The issue is just, why go through the backdoor rather than it being sold as grains rather than rice, grains made from different starch sources,” Lizada said.

Lizada holds two patents on ethylene-reated technologies to extend the post-harvest life of mango and other horticultural perishables.

As the first acting director of the Bureau of Agriculture and Fisheries Product Standards of the Department of Agriculture (DA) from 1999-2001, Lizada served as the National Codex Contact Point and was later elected by the FAO, WHO Codex Alimentarius Commission to the Codex Executive Committee as the member from Asia.

She earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California-Davis.

National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) president William Padolina said yesterday that the controversy over the spread of fake or synthetic rice raises the need for government to improve their regulatory laboratories.

Padolina said there were also other fake items that proliferate in the country but are not monitored or discovered because of the lack of capacity of government regulatory laboratories to conduct tests.

Padolina said the government laboratories should have high output.

“They should be able to analyze many samples at the shortest possible time,” Padolina said. – With Edith Regalado, Gerry Lee Gorit

 

Philippine Star