It's not true that pasta makes you fat.

Scientific literature is demolishing a false belief that has fueled much health waste and is increasingly demonstrating that pasta doesn't make you fat. Indeed, it confirms an old theorem underlying the Mediterranean diet, According to the study, carbohydrates should provide between 45 and 65 percent of daily energy, depending on the person's activity level. But let's take a closer look at the research that completely shifts the focus on pasta and its risks with respect to overweight and obesity.

• A revision of numerous international studies, conducted at the Department of Food Science and Nutrition, University of Minnesota, and some clinical trials have shown that Pasta consumption is not associated with weight gain or obesity and sometimes it is inversely correlated with BMI or abdominal adiposity, especially if included in a healthy eating pattern such as the Mediterranean diet or a low glycemic index diet.

A second studio very interesting, published in the scientific journal Nutrition & Diabetes and carried out by the IRCCS Neuromed of Pozzilli (Isernia) has analysed the data collected by over 23.000 people Italian women from various regions of Italy. Their eating habits were examined and the final conclusion was that pasta consumption was not associated with high body mass index (BMI) or waist-to-hip ratio values.

In particular, according to this research:

• There is no association between pasta consumption and weight gain: those who ate more pasta did not show a higher BMI.
• Rather, Pasta consumption was associated with a lower BMI, smaller waist circumference, and a better waist-to-hip ratio. compared to those who ate little or nothing.
• In other words, in the analyzed data the pasta was not found to be a risk factor for obesity, and, in the context of the Mediterranean diet, it was found to be associated with body parameters considered to be more “healthy”.

The third study get from the University of Parma and it was published on the scientific journal Nutrition, Metabolism & Cardiovascular Diseases (also cited with title Body weight of individuals with obesity decreases after a 6‑month high pasta or low pasta Mediterranean diet weight‑loss intervention). In this case the investigation concerned  the effect of two low-calorie Mediterranean diets which differed in the frequency of pasta consumption in obese subjects.

• Two low-calorie diets have been proposed in the style of Mediterranean diet, both low in energy, but with different frequency of pasta consumption:
  • High Pasta: consumed pasta >5 times a week,
  • Low Pasta: consumed pasta ≤3 times a week.
  The final result, in terms of comparisons, was quite surprising:

• Weight reduction: Both groups lost weight after 6 months of dieting and maintained the loss after 12 months. On average: approximately -10% of body weight in the High Pasta group e -7% in the Low Pasta group.
• Metabolic parameters: both groups significantly improved:
• - anthropometric indicators (weight, fat mass),
• Il carbohydrate and lipid metabolism (therefore improvements in metabolic aspects related to obesity and cardiometabolic risk).
• Blood pressure and heart rate: no significant changes were observed in these parameters.
• Perceived quality of life: the group that consumed more pasta reported a greater improvement in self-perceived quality of life, especially in the area of ​​physical health.

In practice, this study not only debunked the common belief that pasta makes you fat, but also showed that a diet that includes its daily consumption leads to greater weight loss.