Good News – They Say Pasta Doesn’t Make Us Gain Weight
Some researchers were studying pasta’s effects on weight gain, and determined that it really doesn’t affect us at all.
By nowproducerdave on April 4, 2018
I think I let out a verbal “yay” why I read the headline. Someone decided to actually study the relationship between carbohydrates in pasta vs weight gain, and found that if people ate a few servings of pasta per week, over the course of a 12-week span, they actually lost weight.
See also: College students set fire to apartment after cooking pasta without water.
Doctors working on the research say that people have been lumping pasta into the same category as sugary foods, breads, and even rice as far as weight gain “bad” foods. It’s not that it’s a “good” food, but with proper serving sizes and a balanced diet overall, it’s not going to harm you in any way, they say. “Although systematic reviews and meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials of dietary patterns that include these foods but are low in glycemic index, high in whole grains and/or high in dietary fiber have shown advantages for weight-related outcomes, there has been a general lack of recognition of the importance of carbohydrate quality,” they say.
They determined that in reality, as long as you’re focussing on a healthy diet in general, pasta is a perfectly safe food to eat, and it won’t contribute to weight gain (as long as it’s “good” pasta, like whole grain/low in sugar). Participants who were studied for this research ate 3.3 servings of pasta per week, and at the end of 12 weeks there was an average 1-pound weight loss reported. So basically, if you’re trying to lose weight or just trying to stay the way you are now, you don’t have to cut it out totally. And that’s exciting. It probably comes down to the sauce that you use though, but we didn’t really see anything about that in this study, unfortunately. Check out their full report here.