Ohmic heating has been shown to increase the extraction yields of sucrose from sugar beets, apple juice from apples, beet dye from beet root, and soymilk from soybeans. Rice bran is a byproduct of the rice milling process that has economic potential by virtue of highly nutritious rice bran oil contained within the bran. In this study, ohmic heating-was used to stabilize rice bran and to improve rice bran oil extraction yield as compared to microwave heating and a control (no heating). Results showed that ohmic heating is an effective method for rice bran stabilization with moisture addition. Free fatty acid concentration increased more slowly than the control for raw bran samples subjected to ohmic heating with no corresponding temperature rise, indicating that electricity has a non-thermal effect on lipase activity. Ohmic heating increased the total percent of lipids extracted from rice bran to a maximum of 92%, while 53% of total lipids were extracted from the control samples. Lowering the frequency of alternating current significantly increased the amount of oil extracted, probably due to electroporation. Ohmic heating was successfully applied to rice bran despite its high oil content. This could have important implications for the enhanced extraction of non-polar constituents. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.