Rice, one of the world’s staple foods, feeds hundreds of millions of people daily. It’s also high in starch, “which turns to sugar, and often thereafter body fat,” says the Washington Post. An undergraduate student in Sri Lanka has found a simple, two-step way to reduce the calorie count by as much as 50 percent. The first step is to add coconut oil to boiling water before putting rice in the pot. Step two is to cool the cooked rice in a refrigerator for 12 hours. The oil interacts with the starch in rice and changes its architecture. Chilling the rice promotes the conversion of some of the starch to “resistant” starch that is harder to digest, which means people extract fewer calories from it. The student, Sudhair James, presented his preliminary research to the American Chemical Society earlier this week. “The prospect of lower calorie rice is a big deal. Obesity rates are rising around the world, particularly in the developing world, where people rely more heavily on cheaper food staples,” says the Post.