Thirteen weeks. One clear winner.

Every Monday this quarter, I strapped on my glucose monitor and tested one food. Banana. Diet soda. Sourdough. Oatmeal with honey. White rice. Grapes. A green smoothie. My morning latte. A splash of vinegar. A loaded bagel. A plain potato.

One of them beat every other food in this newsletter's history.

It wasn't the smoothie. It wasn't even the bagel, cream cheese and all. So which food won? Here's the number.

This is one person's experiment, not medical advice. Everyone's body responds differently.

The University of Sydney runs the world's biggest glycemic index database, and jasmine white rice tests close to 89 out of 100 there. Pure sugar sits at 100. So rice, the food on almost every dinner plate on earth, breaks down into blood sugar nearly as fast as sugar itself.

In other words, your body barely treats white rice like a starch at all. It treats it like syrup.

It's revealing.

But why? Rice starch is soft and loosely packed, so digestive enzymes tear through it fast. There's almost no fiber left once it's milled and polished. And a typical bowl is a big pile of that starch with nothing to slow it down. Put those three things together and you get the sharpest rise of the quarter.

A study published this month even compared rice directly against another food we've blamed for years: the potato. Researchers gave adults with type 2 diabetes daily servings of baked potato or rice for twelve weeks each, then measured blood sugar, blood pressure and blood vessel health. The two starches performed almost identically. So the old idea that potatoes are uniquely bad and rice is a safer carb… it doesn't hold up. They're closer than we thought.

You don't have to give up rice. You just have to change one step: let it get cold.

A researcher in Indonesia measured it directly. Cooled and reheated white rice produced a meaningfully smaller blood sugar response than rice eaten fresh off the stove. Same rice. Same amount. One night in the fridge.

So the fix isn't a different grain. It's patience.

Rice took the top spot. But it wasn't lonely up there. Here's how the quarter's foods stacked up, and what each one was sold to us as.

"Rice isn't the villain. How you cook it decides everything."

Thirteen weeks in, here's what I know for sure. And what I don't.

I know rice spiked me harder than anything else I tested this quarter. I know cooling it cut that spike nearly in half on my own monitor. What I don't know is whether that holds for every rice, every body, every bowl size. The research points the same way I saw it go, but it's still early days for a lot of this.

We don't have to give up the foods we love. We just have to get a little smarter about how we cook them.

Stay steady