You can eat pasta again, you just have to prepare it properly, so that all of the starches aren’t absorbed immediately by your body. A few days back I found a story about preparing rice in such a way, and now the theory that I had that it also applied to the other bad starches has been proposed as well. Now there is this report in Mother Jones:

Why Leftover Pasta Might Be Healthier Than Fresh

Researchers from the University of Surrey found that eating cold pasta resulted in smaller spikes in glucose than eating freshly cooked pasta. These results were even more pronounced when the pasta was reheated: The study participants who had the reheated pasta instead of fresh reduced spikes in blood sugar by 50 percent. A previous study in 2009 also showed that freshly cooked legumes, cereals, and tubers had significantly higher levels of resistant starch after multiple cycles of heating and cooling. The resistant starch in peas, which had the most dramatic change, increased by 115 percent. Resistant starch consumption has been linked to improvements in gut functioning,insulin sensitivity,increased satiety and even decrease in fat accumulation.

These things all add up. I really don’t want to forego pasta, rice, potatoes or beans. All of those things are ingredients in thousands of REALLY delicious things. If there is a way to make rice or pasta that cuts in half the bad blood sugar reactions from eating them, I am overjoyed. I can be careful and cook pasta today, put olive oil or butter on it after it’s done, let it cool and reheat it and eat it the following day. That’s easy as can be, if I get the benefit of half the blood sugar spike! I can do the same thing with potatoes, rice, and dried beans.

If you process your food to the minimum extent possible, the idea here is to let your teeth do most of the processing, then that also has an effect on how many calories your system will extract from your foods. A smoothie or puree is like liquid energy, it will all be processed quickly. Whole fruits and vegetables take the entire trip through your bowel to be processed, and it makes a difference to you. Slower processing means less of the energy goes to fat, more is used in muscle and organ. You see, your muscles and organs need energy at the instant it is used. If your food is going instantly into your blood then your blood sugar goes too high, forcing insulin to store it to fat right away, because high blood sugar is not allowed. If the blood sugar doesn’t go too high, if the energy comes into the blood at closer to the rate it is being used by muscle and organ, then less of that energy is converted to fat.

These concepts are all covered in the excellent science book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes. You will understand HDL and LDL cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose, sucrose, and fructose…etc. You will learn how body fat goes up and down over the course of a day. You will learn why some people put more of their carbohydrates into fat stores than other people. You will learn that the only place that fructose can go is into fat, it cannot be converted by muscle or organ.