It's said that rice oil nutrition matches ginseng soup. Is this a rumor?

When cooking porridge, rice oil floats on the surface, which is mainly composed of dextrin (the intermediate product of rice starch decomposed into glucose) and a small amount of monosaccharide. The longer the rice is cooked, the more gelatinized it is, and the more rice oil is, the easier it is to be digested and absorbed by the human body. As the saying goes, "rice oil nourishes ginseng", the main reason is that drinking rice oil will "gain meat", which has a lot to do with people's living conditions and eating habits in the past. In the era of food poverty, people often have insufficient energy intake, which makes it difficult to digest and absorb. Drinking rice oil is easier to be absorbed by the human body and can increase energy. But for people in modern society, it is not applicable. Many modern people are not lack of energy, but have excess energy. Rice oil contains almost no other nutrients except energy that we can absorb quickly. Therefore, it is unnecessary for ordinary people to deliberately drink rice oil, especially obese people and diabetics.

However, during the growth and development of infants, patients who need liquid food and elderly people with poor digestion and absorption function can drink rice oil in moderation in order to reduce the burden on the digestive system. After the millet is boiled, the macromolecular starch will undergo hydrolysis reaction, resulting in small molecular dextrin, a small amount of fat, vitamin B1, vitamin B2, potassium and other nutrients rich in millet. They float on the surface of porridge and turn into a thin layer of "rice oil" after a little cooling. A similar hydrolysis process also occurs in the digestive process of human body. Macromolecular starch can not be directly absorbed and utilized by human body, and needs to be decomposed into micromolecule polysaccharides under the action of enzymes, and then further decomposed into monosaccharides for human body to absorb and utilize. As we all know, millet is rich in dietary fiber and belongs to coarse grains. However, excessive intake of dietary fiber may increase the burden on the stomach and cause flatulence.

Millet becomes easy to digest after being cooked into millet porridge, even people with chronic gastritis can eat it. However, easy digestion does not mean that "rice oil" is rich in nutrition, and "strong nourishing ability" and "can replace ginseng soup" are exaggerated. When we cook porridge with millet or rice at home, when the porridge is cooked for a period of time, a thick layer of rice foam will float on the top layer, or the porridge is cooked very well. After a little cooling and precipitation, we can see a delicate sticky substance floating on the top layer of the porridge, which is shaped like ointment. This is what Chinese medicine calls "rice oil", commonly known as porridge oil. I remember a joke: once upon a time, there was a family in the village. The daughter-in-law gave birth to a daughter, and her mother-in-law was very dissatisfied. So I gave my daughter-in-law thick rice soup instead of dry food at dinner. Unexpectedly, after a month, the daughter-in-law not only didn't lose weight, but also looked better and better.

Despite the contradiction between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, Chinese medicine actually thinks that millet is sweet and has the function of invigorating spleen and stomach. Rice is sweet and flat, and has the effects of invigorating the spleen, regulating the stomach and quenching thirst. After rice or millet is boiled with porridge, a large part of nutrients enter the soup, especially the rice oil floating on it is the most nutritious and the essence of rice porridge. Even some doctors think that it has the strongest nourishing power, no less than the nourishing drug Ginseng Radix Rehmanniae. Wang Mengying, a medical scientist in the Qing Dynasty, gave a high evaluation of rice oil in Life Taste Diet Spectrum, and thought that "rice oil can replace ginseng soup"; It is also said that ancient physicians often used ginseng soup to replenish their vitality when treating extremely weak patients. But some poor families have no money to buy ginseng, so they use porridge oil instead of ginseng soup, and the effect is also very good. So porridge oil really has the same effect as ginseng.