An experiment that shocked the scientists: Reheating pasta improves its nutritional qualities!

From a report by BBC: 

...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."

According to the report, the advantages of this are:

• Smaller rise in blood sugar
• More pre-biotics to feed the good bacteria in your gut
• Fewer calories absorbed.

But this gets better...

Curious but doubtful as to whether reheating the pasta would retain the benefits of cooling, the BBC asked a couple doctors to conduct a small experiment with nine participants. They tested eating the pasta original hot, after it was chilled, and chilled then reheated, testing the changes in their blood sugar several times. The results?

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.

At least one of the doctors will be continuing the research on a more scientific level, to see whether adding resistant starch to one's diet can improve some of the blood results associated with diabetes.

This doesn't mean you can pig out on big bowls of spaghetti, but it does make that leftover lasagna a little more guilt free!

Read the full article

Two handy apps for comparing food nutrition info

Have you ever wondered how two foods stack up against each other, nutrition-wise? Here are a couple handy online tools that will help you do just that.

Self Magazine's Nutrition Data

This is an extensive database with great depth of nutrion info on a wide variety of foods. Looking at a single food you can find out how filling it is compared to how nutritios it is, as well as showing you a calorie breakdown for carbs, fats and protein:

Or how complete its nutrient (vitamins and minerals) or protein profile is (i.e, how many essential amino acids its contains). 

There are also detailed lists on where the calories come from, how the carbs break down, info on fats and fatty acids, and more.

You can access all this information for free and without registering. You can also choose to compare two or more foods, but for that, you will need to register. (You will be able to opt out from getting emails sent to you.)

Two Foods

While TwoFoods.com gives you limited control and limited data, it is super simple to operate. Simply type in two food names, and you can find out how they compare in calories, carbs, fat and protein. Say, Wheat Thins vs. Triscuits, for example...

And which is healthier for topping your cracker, low fat cheddar cheese, or low fat cream cheese?

Now you have no excuse for choosing the least healthy between two snack options. (Sorry!)

The best low carb salads at Panera

I love Panera! Even though I rarely get bagels or sweets there any more, I love their salads and appreciate the fact that they provide some nutrition info right up front. The calories are listed right on the menu. Pretty bold!

However, I don't believe that counting calories is all that useful. (Here's why, at least partially.) So I went to Panera's website and downloaded the nutrition info and did a little spreadsheet work. If you're focusing on controlling diabetes and/or eating low carb (South Beach, etc.), a useful thing to consider is the protein to carb ratio. That is, are there more protein than carbs, and in what proportion?

Based on my personal study into food's effect on insulin and blood sugar, my approach to healthy eating is to try to keep an approximate balance between carbs and protein. More protein than carbs is okay; more carbs than protein is not. So in my protein-to-carbs (P-to-C) approach, I'm looking for a ration that 1 or higher.

Here's an example: If your "protein bar" has 10 grams of protein, but 30 grams of carbs, it has a  P-to-C  ratio of 0.33 -- not good! However, a spoonful of sugar-free peanut butter has 8 grams of protein and 6 grams of carbs; a ratio of 1.25 -- much better!

I looked at all of Panera's whole salads, including the dressing. Here are their four lowest-carb salads, with their respective ratios.


ALL of the other salads on their menu are below 1.0.

Of course, there's more to healthy eating than carbs and protein, but as I said, if you're looking to control your blood sugar (glucose) or trying to lose weight by watching carbs, these are some important numbers to know.


I am not employed by or affiliated with Panera Bread, and this is not a sponsored post. I am not a medical or nutrition expert; just someone who cares about my health enough to dig for the facts.