Good news! Italian scientists say pasta doesn’t make you fat

Italian scientists are sure: pasta doesn’t make you fat. Isn’t this the most excellent news for pasta-lovers all around the world?

Contrary to popular belief, the consumption of this yummy food does not provoke obesity in people: researchers in Italy, the home of the most exquisite pasta in the world, studied over 23,000 people in the country and discovered that a higher pasta intake is not, in fact, associated with a real raised body mass index (BMI) and waist-to-hip ration.

The team explains that, “as a traditional component of the Mediterranean diet, pasta consumption was negatively associated with BMI, wait circumference and waist-to-hip ratio and with a lower prevalence of overweight and obesity”. The result of their study was recently published in the Nutrition and Diabetes journal.

But what makes pasta so devilish in people’s mind? Possibly its carbohydrates. At the same time, though, this yummy food was also demonized as calorific and lacking nutrition. But the latest Italian study shows that those assumptions are false: IRCCS Istituto Neurologico Mediterraneo Neuromed compared results from participants in the Molise region, Italy, with another group of people from the rest of the country. The two groups were analyzed separately by INHES (Italian Nutrition & Health Survey project),

"Our findings show a negative association of pasta consumption with general and central obesity in two methodologically and geographically different, large Mediterranean populations," says the research team, adding that, in the last decades in Italy and despite the strong effort to promote a Mediterranean diet, “a progressive change occurred in eating habits. Pasta consumption has been decreased, as a concept of low carbohydrate and high protein diet against obesity emerged. However, the debate of hypo-caloric high protein diets versus low fat and standard carbohydrate diets in the management of body weight and the health implications (that is, kidney function, bone health) is still open. On the contrary, adherence to the Mediterranean diet according to epidemiological and clinical evidence has a protective role on overweight and obesity, in parallel with important health benefits against chronic diseases and related comorbidities”.