Is aval healthier than rice, or does it just feel lighter?
Almost every patient who tells me they have “stopped rice for breakfast” has moved to aval, and says the word light while saying it. The lightness is real, and it is a trick of water. Aval is paddy that has been soaked, steamed, roasted and rolled flat, and the rolling drives the water out — so a bowl of it weighs very little and swells enormously in the pan. The carbohydrate does not go anywhere. IFCT 2017 puts dry aval at 76.75 g of available carbohydrate per 100 g, against 78.24 g for raw milled rice and 77.16 g for parboiled milled rice; the same table gives it 3.46 g of dietary fibre, 7.44 g of protein and 68.06 g of starch. Those three entries — A011, A015 and A014 — sit within two grams of each other. So aval is not a different grain wearing a health label. It is rice, pressed. What makes it usable for a person with diabetes is something else entirely: you measure aval dry, in your hand, before it swells, and nobody has ever successfully eyeballed a ladle of cooked rice.
What is the glycemic index of aval?
Higher than its reputation, and it depends on the flake. The cleanest Indian measurement comes from a Chennai study published in the Journal of Diabetology (2022), which made upma from two kinds of flakes and tested it in healthy volunteers under a validated protocol: white rice flake upma came out at 70.4 ± 5.6 — the high band — and brown rice flake upma at 63.3 ± 6.2, the medium band. The brown flakes carried 6.2 g of dietary fibre per 100 g against 1.8 g in the commercial white ones, with the bran and germ visible under the microscope. A 2025 Tamil Nadu study of flakes rolled from heirloom rices (Amuthaselvi et al., Journal of Food Measurement and Characterization) found the same direction from the other side: ordinary white flakes pushed the glucose peak later and higher, while red kavuni flakes peaked early and settled, and the heirloom flakes kept people full longer. Neither result makes aval dangerous. Both put it exactly where rice sits — see the rice-variety GI chart.
How much aval is one portion?
Forty to fifty grams of dry flakes per person. That is the whole answer, and it is worth weighing once on a kitchen scale so your palm learns it, because after that you will never need the scale again. Here is the arithmetic, and everything marked estimate is my own calculation from published composition figures rather than a measured value.
| What is actually eaten | Carbohydrate | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| 40 g dry aval, cooked as vegetable aval upma | ~31 g | IFCT 2017, code A011 (estimate) |
| 50 g dry aval — a generous home plateful | ~38 g | IFCT 2017, code A011 (estimate) |
| One bowl of vegetable poha, as tabulated | ~21 g | Indian Nutrient Databank (Vijayakumar et al., 2024) |
| One plate of sprouted moong poha | ~51 g | Indian Nutrient Databank |
| 50 g handful of aval vilayichathu | ~40 g, of it ~21 g free sugar | equal-weight recipe + IFCT 2017 (estimate) |
| One tall glass of avil milk | ~60 g | aval, banana, milk, 2 tsp sugar (estimate) |
| One cup of cooked white rice, for comparison | ~42 g | cooked rice ≈ 28 g per 100 g (estimate) |
Read the last row against the first. A measured aval breakfast is a smaller carbohydrate load than the rice plate it replaced — which is the whole reason I let patients make the switch — and the same aval, poured freely and eaten sweet, is a larger one.
Red aval or white aval — does it matter?
It does, and here it is easy, because the red flake is on the same shelf. White aval is milled from polished rice; chuvanna aval or matta aval is rolled from Kerala’s parboiled red rice, keeping bran that the polishing removes. The Chennai testing measured the gap rather than assuming it: 6.2 grams of fibre per 100 g in the brown flakes against 1.8 in the white, and a GI of 63 rather than 70. The second variable is the cut. Thick aval holds its shape, needs a proper soak and takes longer to break down; thin or “nylon” aval collapses the moment water touches it, and that speed shows up in the reading. So the shopping instruction is two words long: thick, red. One thing the rinse will not do, whichever packet you buy, is remove sugar: washing takes off loose surface starch and dust, but the starch locked inside the flake is what gets digested, and no length of soaking touches it. Note that this mirrors exactly what happens with the grain itself — the argument on red rice versus white rice is the same argument, one processing step earlier.
What about sweet aval and avil milk?
That is where the trouble actually is. Nobody’s HbA1c was ever ruined by vegetable aval upma; the damage sits in the sweet forms, and this district eats all of them. Aval vilayichathu — flakes candied in jaggery syrup with coconut bits and ghee — is made in published Kerala recipes with roughly equal weights of aval and jaggery, and IFCT 2017 gives cane jaggery 84.32 g of free sugars per 100 g. On that arithmetic a 50 g handful from the tin carries about 21 g of free sugar, roughly five teaspoons; the tin sits open on the shelf for three days, which is the real problem. Aval nanachathu, the uncooked version mixed with jaggery and grated coconut, is the same sum with less ghee. Avil milk, the Malabar glass of roasted aval, mashed ripe banana, sweetened milk and nuts, comes to roughly 60 g of carbohydrate by my estimate — see nendran banana and jaggery for why neither ingredient is the innocent one. Order sambaram instead.
What to say at the shop, and what to do on Kuchela Dinam
At the provision shop in Marthandam, Kuzhithurai or Nagercoil, ask for “chuvanna aval, kattiyulla” — red aval, the thick one; in Tamil, sivappu aval, thadimaana. The packets are usually labelled in English as Red Aval (Thick) or Matta Aval, so you can also simply point. Buy the small pack: aval goes rancid faster than rice does. At home, rinse briefly, drain, and cook it with onion, curry leaves, a fistful of peanuts or roasted kadala and as much vegetable as you can fit — that pairing is what turns a 70 into a workable breakfast, and it is the same logic as the kadala rule on the puttu page. Then the temple day. On Kuchela Dinam — Wednesday 16 December 2026, the first Wednesday of Dhanu, devotees carry packets of aval to Guruvayur and to Krishna temples on both sides of our border, remembering Kuchela’s handful of beaten rice; sweetened aval comes back as prasadam, as it does at Ashtami Rohini. Nobody should refuse it. Take one spoon after a proper meal, hand the packet on, and keep the offering intact without keeping the tin. One caution for the same week: if you replace a big rice breakfast with a small aval one while taking sulfonylureas or insulin, you can run low by mid-morning — read the low-sugar page, and let the doctor managing your medication adjust the dose. You should not.
Sources used on this page
- IFCT 2017 (ICMR-NIN, Hyderabad) — entry A011 “Rice flakes”, sampled across six regions, for every composition figure above; entries A014 and A015 for the rice comparison and I001 for cane jaggery. IFCT lists the Tamil and Malayalam names for A011 as the same word, aval, which is why this page needs no translation column.
- Journal of Diabetology 13(1):49–55, 2022, “Nutritional and glycemic properties of brown and white rice flakes upma” — the GI figures of 63.3 and 70.4 and the fibre figures of 6.2 and 1.8 g%. Small, healthy-volunteer study; treat the numbers as a direction, not a decimal.
- Amuthaselvi et al., Journal of Food Measurement and Characterization, 2025 — heirloom kavuni and kattuyanam flakes against ordinary white flakes for postprandial glucose and satiety.
- Indian Nutrient Databank (Vijayakumar, Dubasi, Awasthi & Jaacks, Current Developments in Nutrition, 2024) — the per-bowl figures for cooked vegetable poha and sprouted moong poha; it is built on IFCT 2017.
- Published Kerala recipes for aval vilayichathu, aval nanachathu and avil milk, used only for ingredient ratios in the estimates, never for nutrition claims.
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