As far as I'm aware, all the current medical literature states to avoid simple carbs (like white rice) to prevent insulin spikes, and to eat things like whole grain breads instead. But, we noticed that this seems to only be true for people of European descent - my Asian co-workers were able to process white rice just fine. Which kind of makes sense - East Asian people eat a ton of rice, and yet they're thin.
This is all purely anecdotal of course, and I'm not a doctor, but we do know that different ethnicities process food differently (e.g. lactose), and it's not so hard to imagine that our current dietary recommendations might be a bit skewed, because the people in the datasets are mostly of European ancestry.
1. https://www.clinicalcorrelations.org/2018/11/30/how-diabetes...
2. https://asiandiabetesprevention.org/what-is-diabetes/why-are...
But it's supposedly healthier (there's a famous story about how eating too much white rice crippled the Japanese navy [1]), and personally I think it tastes better too.
[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e...
> Despite its long history in Japan rice was, for a long time, a food reserved for the warriors and the nobility. It was consumed by the majority of the population only from the seventeenth century onwards, not becoming the basis of Japanese food until the early twentieth century
https://www.japan-experience.com/to-know/chopsticks-at-the-r...
> A disproportionate share of the rice crop was therefore consumed in the cities and by the political and economic elite, while the diet of much of the rural population continued to depend on the availability of a range of other grains – wheat, millet, barley, etc. – together with vegetables, fruit, pulses and occasional fish or game, grown at home or collected in the locality.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0955580070133003...