Artificial Rice As an Alternative Functional Food to Support Food Diversification Program

Functional food is a food that has a beneficial effect to the body beyond its adequate nutritional effects. It can help improve someone’s health and/or decrease the risk of disease. The awareness in the community of the importance of health encourages the development of functional food. One of the functional food that has been developed in Indonesia is the artificial rice. Artificial rice, an alternative paddy rice substitute, has a minimally equal value to paddy rice. Artificial rice is made to reduce people’s dependence on paddy rice and to support food diversification program to achieve food security in Indonesia. Artificial rice is made from a non-paddy rice flour with a certain compositions, so that it can be used as a vehichle to make a functional food and can be fortified with ingredients that contain functional active compounds. Indonesian researchers have developed artificial rice products by utilizing local resources, such as corn, sorghum, spices, tubers, and others, to obtain an artificial rice with improved nutritional and functional characters that have some health benefits such as antidiabetic, antioxidant, antihypertensive, and anticancer. Such development has resulted in the observation that artificial rice can be used as a functional food for rice substitute with an equal or better nutritional value than paddy rice. However, further research is still needed to improve the sensory quality of artificial rice so that it can be accepted easily by the community. Keywords: Artificial rice, food diversification, functional food, rice analogue