How many teaspoons of sugar in a bowl of basmati rice?

Basmati rice is the headline example in the 2016 paper by Unwin, Haslam and Livesey, which describes the teaspoon figures on its common foods chart as ranging from broccoli at the bottom to a portion of basmati rice at the top. It appears on three charts in all: common foods, South Asian foods, and the sugar burden chart.

The common foods chart gives a 150g bowl of boiled basmati a glycaemic index of 69 and the teaspoon figure shown here. Table 1 of the paper supplies the rest of the working for the same bowl. It describes the rice as white basmati boiled for 8 minutes, lists 40g of available carbohydrate, and prints a glycaemic load of 28. Multiplied out without rounding, the load is 27.6. The South Asian foods chart lists “Rice, boiled” at the same GI, weight and teaspoon figure.

The sugar burden chart gives basmati per 100g instead, at 6.8 teaspoons, in its column of foods digested down into sugars. Scaled to 150g, that is 10.2, within rounding of the other sources.

Cooking time is in the Table 1 entry for a reason. Rice cooked longer absorbs more water and its starch softens, which tends to raise the GI. Rice that is cooked and then cooled forms some resistant starch, and cooled or reheated rice has been reported to test lower in some studies, though none of the charts measures it.

Basmati is a long-grain aromatic rice grown mainly in India and Pakistan. The other rices in the calculator, white rice and brown rice, come from a different chart that does not name a variety.