Yes, of course, this would be an English question. From the BBC:
… A rapid rise in blood glucose, followed by a rapid fall, can often make you feel hungry again quite soon after a meal. It’s true of sugary sweets and cakes, but it’s also true for things like pasta, potatoes, white rice and white bread. That’s why dieticians emphasise the importance of eating foods that are rich in fibre, as these foods produce a much more gradual rise and fall in your blood sugars.
But what if you could change pasta or potatoes into a food that, to the body, acts much more like fibre? Well, it seems you can. Cooking pasta and then cooling it down changes the structure of the pasta, turning it into something that is called “resistant starch”.
It’s called “resistant starch” because once pasta, potatoes or any starchy food is cooked and cooled it becomes resistant to the normal enzymes in our gut that break carbohydrates down and releases glucose that then causes the familiar blood sugar surge.
So, according to scientist Dr Denise Robertson, from the University of Surrey, if you cook and cool pasta down then your body will treat it much more like fibre, creating a smaller glucose peak and helping feed the good bacteria that reside down in your gut. You will also absorb fewer calories, making this a win-win situation.
One obvious problem is that many people don’t really like cold pasta. So what would happen if you took the cold pasta and warmed it up?…
Medical researchers recruited volunteers to eat pasta “with a plain but delicious sauce of tomatoes and garlic” — fresh, cold, or reheated — and have their blood glucose tested afterwards:
Just as expected, eating cold pasta led to a smaller spike in blood glucose and insulin than eating freshly boiled pasta had.
But then we found something that we really didn’t expect – cooking, cooling and then reheating the pasta had an even more dramatic effect. Or, to be precise, an even smaller effect on blood glucose.
In fact, it reduced the rise in blood glucose by 50%.
This certainly suggests that reheating the pasta made it into an even more “resistant starch”. It’s an extraordinary result and one never measured before.
Denise is now going to continue her research – funded by Diabetes UK – looking at whether, even without other dietary modifications, adding resistant starch to the diet can improve some of the blood results associated with diabetes…
More detail at the link. Others have been quick to point out that resistant starch has the same calorie count as ‘regular’ pasta, but calories aren’t the sole health issue here.
Friday Not-Exactly Recipe Exchange: “Is Reheated Pasta Less Fattening?”Post + Comments (71)