Are Rice Cakes Good Diet Food?

The crunchy rice cake bears little resemble to a soft, baked cake; however, including rice cakes in your diet may be a wise choice. It's not always easy to find snacks to fit into your diet plan, but comparing the nutritional information of the rice cake to other food choices can help.

Identification

Puffed brown rice is the main ingredient in most rice cakes. Commercial flavors of rice cakes include varieties such as plain, apple cinnamon, popcorn flavored, chocolate and cheese flavored. The rice cakes generally come in two sizes mini or standard size. If you make your own rice cakes, you add spices or seasonings to cooked rice, shape the rice into a patty and either brown it in a oiled skillet or bake it in a hot oven.

Benefits

Eating rice cakes as part of your diet can help you feel satisfied and less hungry. Choosing a low-calorie rice cake over a high-calorie bag of potato chips will enable you to keep your snack calories lower throughout the day. Reducing the caloric content of each meal and snack you eat throughout the day can help you lose weight. If you are trying to cut 500 calories a day from your diet, substituting a rice cake for chips or a candy bar can save you 232 to 251 calories per day, respectively.

Nutritional Information

A plain rice cake has only 35 calories, making it a very-low calorie snack. Of those calories, about 9 percent, or .74 g come from protein, 7 percent, or .25 g come from fat and 7.33 g, or 84 percent from carbohydrates. The rice cake contains .4 g of fiber, 1 mg of calcium and 29 mg of sodium. The carbohydrates in a rice cake give you energy and assist in your satiety level.

Strategies

Eat plain rice cakes in combination with 1 tsp. of protein-rich peanut butter or 1/2 oz. of sharp cheddar cheese to add to the nutritional value of the rice cake. Choose sweet flavors of rice cakes to satisfy your sweet tooth to avoid eating candy as a snack. If you are following a 1,500 calorie diet, eating a very low-calorie snack allows you to save more calories for your main meals.

Warning

Even though rice cakes are low in calories, eating snacks too frequently may be detrimental to your diet, as evidenced by an April 2005 study published in the "International Journal of Obesity." The participants who ate the snacks most frequently tended to eat more calories than the participants who ate less snacks. Vary your snacks between rice cakes, raw vegetables, whole fruits and fat-free yogurt for variety and increased nutrient intake.