Researchers in Sri Lanka believe they've found a cooking process that'll reduce the amount of calories in rice by as much as 50%.

The trick is to add coconut oil to the boiling water before adding the grains — roughly a teaspoon of oil for every half a cup of rice.

They suggest to let the rice cool in the refrigerator for 12 hours after cooking, and then just heat it up in the microwave whenever you're ready to eat.

Adding coconut oil and cooling the rice before consuming it allows the grains to build up resistant starch, which has a lower caloric count than the digestible starches usually created from cooking.

The researchers now want to see if the same result can occur with other naturally starchy foods, like bread.

Rice is a mainstay of dozens of different cuisines around the world, and pretty much the fuel that keeps uni students alive (alongside instant noodles).

But although the versatile grain is cheap and easy to cook, there's one big issue with it - it's not that great for your waistline.

In fact, one cup of cooked rice contains around 240 starchy calories that can be quickly converted into fat if they're not burnt off.

But researchers in Sri Lanka have discovered a simple way of cooking the grain that dramatically cuts its calories by as much as 50 percent, and also offers some other important health benefits. And we're never going to cook rice any other way again.

According to the 2015 study, all you need to do is get a pot of water boiling, but before adding your raw rice, you add coconut oil - about 3 percent of the weight of the rice you're going to add.

So that's roughly a teaspoon for half a cup of rice, explains Sudhair James, an undergraduate chemistry student from the College of Chemical Sciences in Sri Lanka, who led the research with his supervisor.

He presented the work at the National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society in March 2015.

"After it was ready, we let it cool in the refrigerator for about 12 hours. That's it," James told Roberto A. Ferdman from The Washington Post.

To eat it, you simply pop it in the microwave and, voila, you have a "fluffy white rice" that's significantly better for you.

Coconut oil could be the key to healthier rice. Shutterstock

Simple, right? But the process actually involves some pretty fascinating food chemistry. At the heart of the technique is the fact that not all starches are created equal.

There are two main types - digestible starches, which our bodies quickly turn into glucose and store as fat if we don't burn it up; and resistant starches, which aren't broken down into glucose in the stomach, so they have a lower calorie content.

They instead pass through to the large intestine, where they act more like a dietary fiber and can provide all kinds of useful gut benefits.

Although a lot of starchy foods, such as potatoes and rice, start out containing a lot of resistant starches, depending on how we cook them, they often end up chemically changing before we eat them so that they're mostly digestible starches.

Fried rice has more resistant starches than traditional steamed rice. Aly Weisman/Business Insider

Researchers had previously noted that, strangely enough, fried rice and pilaf style rice both seem to have more resistant starch than the more commonly prepared steamed rice.