White rice has no nutritional value. The husk, which contains the vitamins and protein, has been entirely stripped, leaving only the soft kernel inside which has almost no nutrients. Thus minerals and vitamins are added back to white rice during the packaging process to make it somewhat healthy.
Opt for parboiled rice (closest to white once cooked) which is also similarly priced to white, or go wild – literally – and get what is called wild rice, which is just how rice should be. I’m also partial to black rice which can be quite more expensive for rice, but it’s really fragrant and tasty (but be careful with the water, it stains easily).
All of these have a higher protein content than white rice, lower calories, and the nutrients didn’t have to get added back in, they come from the rice itself.
White rice is acts like “empty” carbs on many because they’re just pure sugar (albeit in carbohydrates form, a long chain of glucose) without the important fibres. Alcohol might be an apt comparison if we look at calories alone, it will indeed sustain you in terms of energy, but not much else. you would die if you drank only alcohol, even if somehow the ethanol inside didn’t affect you whatsoever. There’s just no nutrients in it aside from the calorie-heavy macros. White rice is a refined carb by definition.
It hasn’t been known for ages as white rice only became popular after WW2 and was unenriched at first, giving millions of people in Asia vitamin B1 deficiency. It was only after that that manufacturers realized what they’d been doing and added the vitamins and other micros back to rice.
So in terms of enriched white rice… you kinda have to trust the manufacturers are enriching their rice properly, preferably with the ground husk of the rice they just destroyed.
The removal of the bran from rice does indeed come with the loss of certain nutrients, but it is still not purely devoid of them as you imply, and again, not at all comparable to alcohol. White rice still comes with selenium, manganese and niacin [1], which by definition would not make white rice empty calories. Of course you will have deficiencies if your diet is formed mostly of white rice, and that is why it is expected from everyone to have half a brain and make rice a component of a varied diet; brown rice does not escape from this fact either. Keep in mind in this thread we are addressing people in the first world with a wide accessibility to varied foods, and not empoverished third world farmers.