You’ve got an Italian gene or two………YOU LOVE PASTA. But, your body is NOT A BIG FAN – it’s metabolically challenged. Here is an easy to apply trick to eat Italian

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How to turn pasta into a lower glycemic food

Gene eating spaghetti surrouded by pasta

You’ve got an Italian gene or two………YOU LOVE PASTA. But, your body is NOT A BIG FAN – it’s metabolically challenged. Here is an easy to apply trick to eat Italian

You’ve got an Italian gene or two… you LOVE PASTA. But your body is NOT a BIG FAN, because you’re metabolically challenged – use this trick to eat ITALIAN.

You’ve got an Italian gene or two………

YOU LOVE PASTA.

But, your body is NOT A BIG FAN – it’s metabolically challenged. The carb load, sends your sugar levels into the stratosphere. Eish !

Well, researchers from the UK, have your back.

Pasta for the lazy cool

They’ve unearthed a way to lower the glycemic hit of that plate of noodles and it’s perfect if you’re the kind of person, who “hates” to cook.You cook once and then fill up on the left overs.Because……… the leftovers ARE better for you. Lol !

Let’s have pasta for dinner

The team signed up 10 relatively young healthy volunteers, 5 guys and 5 girls and fed them pasta on three separate occasions and then kept tabs on their sugar levels.

Now the pasta dish was the same.

100 g Barilla Selezione Oro penne rigale 73 pasta was made, according to the instructions on the packet. To this, 10 g of olive oil was mixed in and 75 g smooth tomato sauce was added.

The variations came in the way it was served.

Experimental set up for resistant starch in pasta test

On one occasion – it was prepared and then immediately eaten.
On the other two occasions – the pasta was coated with the oil and then popped into the fridge, where it was stored at 4°C, for 2 days.

Left over pasta

The left over pasta, with smooth tomato sauce, was offered to the participants.

Once – stone cold. Yuk !
Once – reheated in the microwave.

The team tracked what happened to their sugar levels………….there was a difference. The solid line with the black squares is the fresh cooked meal. The black triangles are the chilled meal and the black circles with the dotted line, is the chilled and reheated.

Results of OGTT for the effect of resistant starch test on glycemic response to pasta — Postprandial glucose response to three identical pasta meals,
served either freshly cooked, chilled, or chilled and reheated. *© Springer Nature Limited 2020*

Surprise surprise, the best option was the reheated leftovers !

Cold pasta

The reason it happened…………. the starch reacted to the temperature changes. In the process, it became TOUGH AS NAILS. Effectively………..it became UNDIGESTABLE, for YOU.

Human enzymes struggling to untangle resistant starch

Your enzymes are feeble.

A collection of enzyme fire power

But the critters living in your colon, are quite happy to tuck into it and turn it into short chain fatty acids, mainly for their own consumption, but………..you get the left overs.

Something the cells lining your colon, the colonocytes, appreciate.

Introducing resistant starch

The technical term for this, sticky globby goo is resistant starch. Version 4. There are several variants of resistant starch, some are natural, while some are deliberately created by the food industry.

So what happened to the starch, that caused your enzymes to flounder ?

Probing starch structure

The starch granules created by the plant are a mix of two different types of carbs : Amylose and amylopectin.

Both versions are made of glucose, but the arrangement of the sugars is a little different. Amylose is shorter and straighter than amylopectin, which is a bit like a bush.

There is a lot more amylopectin than amylose.

Each plant has it’s own preferred ratio of amylose to amylopectin. The plant in the case of pasta is wheat, but the same principles apply to other starch based foods, such as potato and rice.

The sticky goo

When the starch granules arrive in the hot water, they suck up the water like a sponge and begin to swell. As they do this, the granule goes from being a solid crystal, to an amorphous goo. Since the amylose molecules are short and straight, they are the most mobile and drift out of the swollen starch granules.

The official name for this is gelatinization.

All like it hot

If you tuck into the starch at this point in time – it’s a synch for your enzymes to pull the individual sugar molecules off. So a pasta dinner can easily spike your sugar levels, if insulin is a bit slow to arrive on the scene. Eish !

But, if you don’t eat all the pasta, the situation changes……

Few like it cold

As the temperature cools down, the protruding amylose chains stop being able to move. They rely on the heat, to keep them supple and flexible ! And separate.

They bump into each other and twist up, become a tangled mass of carbs. Your taste buds don’t really notice, but your enzymes do.

A tangled mass of sugar

It’s hard to find the beginning and the end. Your enzymes try, but they’re not fast enough to get through it all………….so some of the starch remains undigested and moves down into the colon.

Where there is no shortage of enzymes ready to tuck in.

And, since food typically remains in the colon for days, there is plenty of time, to get all the knots out and tuck in.

It’s a slow carb

The delay in processing the starch, makes the starch a slow carb. And this delay, can make all the difference, if your insulin response is a bit slow on the uptake. So if you’ve got an Italian gene……….use this trick to EAT Italian, every now and again.

NB. You might consider adding a glass of veno to round out your Italian experience. Turns out, a little wine, with dinner, can also transform fast carbs, into slow carbs. Click here to learn more.

The cumulative effects of chilling and reheating a carbohydrate-based pasta meal on the postprandial glycaemic response: a pilot study. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2021) 75: 570–572. Robertson , JE. Brown, BA. Fielding, M. Denise Robertson.