Rice is Nice.

Poor rice! Rice is getting replaced in meals by more recently popularized stand-ins like quinoa, farro, and wheat berries. I like all of them, but there are some meals where I really want rice and only rice with my meal. Veggie stir-fries would only match up with white jasmine or short-grain brown. Anything but basmati seems wrong to pair with Indian food, and for soups; only white or wild rice will do.

My mom bought me two other varieties of rice recently: red and black. Given that I already knew brown rice is more nutritious than white rice, I wondered if the red and black rice were even more nutritious. I started to look up the nutritional information.

Originally I started to look up multiple varieties of each “color” or rice, but it turns out that the short-grain and long-grain varieties of the same color had the same nutritional info. To simplify the data, I limited the chart to one variety of each color:

	White Rice (Jasmine)	Brown Rice (short grain)	Red Cargo Rice	Black Rice
Serving Size	1/4 cup dry	1/4 cup dry	1/4 dry	1/4 cup dry
Calories	160	170	175	170
Total Carb	36g	38g	36g	38g
Fiber	.5g	3g	2g	3g
Protein	3g	3g	3g	5g
Magnesium	no data	20%	32%	no data
Iron	2%	2%	4%	6%

Yep! Turns out the black rice is the most nutritious, then the red, then the brown, and finally the white rice. I imagine it won't be long before we start seeing the black and red varieties popping up in supermarkets and restaurants.