I have good news for pasta lovers who are trying to be thin. Supposedly, when youreheat your leftover pasta, it magically transforms into more diet-friendly carbs. I am not making this up. And no, I haven't found out if this works for cupcakes, too. Here's what the TV show Trust Me, I'm a Doctor found out about pasta.
Okay, so just as a refresher. You know how pasta usually works, right? The carbs in pasta break down into sugar in your body, hit the bloodstream running, turn on the insulin brigade, and jack up your blood sugar level. Whatever you don't use immediately then turns into fat. Meanwhile your appetite increases.
The demo on the BBC show supposedly proved that when you cook pasta, let it cool, and then reheat it again, it converts into what's called "resistant starch." That's a kind of starch that resists getting broken down completely. On the show, the leftover pasta actually reduced the rise in people's blood sugar by 50 percent.
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Just kidding -- I mean, I do live on leftovers. But is this really a game-changer? Could you actually drop pounds just by reheating leftover pasta? I wonder ... I mean, it's probably something most moms are doing anyway.
But what if we started doing this from the start? I mean, when you make pasta for dinner, you could cook it, let it cool, and then heat it again. Which would make total sense because don't we all have oodles of extra time most nights to cook our pasta TWICE??
Right. So that's obviously not going to work. But it's still interesting to know this (supposedly, according to this one, tiny experiment on a whopping nine volunteers) happens to pasta. If nothing else, you can relax a little while slurping down your leftover spaghetti for lunch today.
What do you think -- will knowing how pasta changes when you reheat it change how you eat it?
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