A new experiment finds that leftover pasta could actually be healthier for you, than
fresh pasta!
Science is amazing.
Hey guys, Tara here for Dnews - and as a fellow lover of food and perpetual dieter, I cannot
tell you how happy I was to read this story today.
But before I get into it, I wanna mention that what I’m about to talk about, isn’t
a scientific article or a peer-reviewed study - it’s from a British television program
called Trust Me, I’m a Doctor, in which a group of scientists did an experiment and
found that reheating pasta - actually makes it healthier for you.
It sounds crazy - but here’s how it works.
Pasta is a carbohydrate, right?
And like all carbohydrates, when you eat it
- it gets broken down by your body into simple sugars, and absorbed - and that, in turn,
causes your blood glucose to spike.
In response to that spike, your body produces a rush of insulin to stabilize your glucose
levels and bring them back down to normal.
So foods with a lot of sugar - like sweets or refined carbs - will cause very intense
spikes in your blood glucose levels.
Foods that are rich in fiber, will still raise your blood glucose levels, but in a much more
gradual manner.
So it’ll be more like THIS and less like THIS.
Which is good - this is part of the reason fiber is so good for you.
And that’s where the experiment comes in.
The idea is that by cooking pasta and then cooling it down, you’re changing the structure
of the carbohydrates, and transforming them into something called “resistant starch.”
Meaning it’s resistant to the particular enzymes in our stomach that break down carbs
and release them in the form of glucose.
So essentially, our body is treating the pasta more like fiber than carbs.
Which also means that you’re absorbing fewer calories.
But of course, a lot of people don’t like cold pasta.
So the scientists thought - well what if you cooked pasta, cooled it down, and then heated
it back up again?
Up until now, they assumed it would go back to its original state.
But nobody knew for sure.
So for this episode, they did just that.
Scientists had three groups of volunteers eat either hot pasta, cold pasta, or pasta
that had been cooled down and heated up again.
Afterwards, they gave blood samples every 15 minutes for two hours, to see how their
blood glucose levels changed over that time.
And all of them started this experiment with empty stomachs.
As expected, the hot fresh pasta caused people’s blood glucose and insulin to spike - whereas
the cold pasta, caused a significantly smaller spike.
But what was unexpected, is that the pasta that had been reheated - which they assumed
would cause a spike similar to that of hot fresh pasta - actually caused an even smaller
spike than the cold pasta.
In fact, reheated pasta - reduced the rise in blood glucose levels by 50%.
Which has enormous implications for health - and especially for people living with diabetes.
Even the research team that conducted this experiment was blown away by the findings.
The next step, they say, is to see if adding more resistant starch to one’s diet over
time, can improve the blood results of someone with diabetes.
What do you guys think?
Are you into leftovers?
I’ll be honest - reheated pasta sounds kinda weird.
But I do love a good pasta salad.
You can let us know your thoughts in the comments below - and as always, thank you guys for
watching!