Okay, this sounds like an internet health story - secret trick to make pasta healthier - but it appears to be real. The BBC series Trust Me, I'm a Doctor takes a look at health issues and tries to put them into an accessible and usable format. It seems they've made a real discovery. They started with a basic question.
Can my leftovers be healthier than the original meal?
Most of us love starchy carbohydrate foods like bread, pasta and potatoes — but they’re not always good for our health. Although starch is an important part of a healthy diet, it’s easily broken down. As soon as we consume starch the body very quickly starts to digest it, releasing sugars into the blood which in turn causes our bodies to release the hormone insulin. It’s a boom and bust cycle that can take a toll on our health.
Dr Chris van Tulleken joined forces with Dr Denise Robertson from the University of Surrey to carry out an experiment. We wanted to find out if there is a simple way to make starchy foods better for us without changing a single ingredient. What no one expected was that we’d make a brand new scientific discovery along the way.
More below the
Orange Omnilepticon.
The video at this link shows the entire experiment, and it's quite striking. The print summary at the link sums it up pretty well also.
The conclusion, which was a surprise to the researcher and the show, was this. There is a very simple step that can be taken with pasta and other foods rich in starch that can make a significant difference in how eating them affects the body, making them much healthier.
Dr Denise Robertson (researcher) and Dr Chris van Tulleken (presenter) took a group of 10 volunteers and served them meals of pasta three ways. They served them a meal freshly cooked and still hot, they served them the same meal from the same batch after it had been refrigerated, and then they served them the meal reheated. This took place over several days. After each meal, the volunteers had blood samples taken at intervals.
When starch is eaten and the body begins digesting it, the sugars that make up starch enter the blood stream fairly quickly; blood glucose levels rise, and then taper off. Pasta that had been served cold produced the same effect - with one difference: blood glucose didn't rise as high. This was because as the starch cooled, it converted into a different form called resistant starch, because it's more resistant to being digested.
The surprise came when they did a third experiment where the pasta was served reheated; the rise in blood glucose levels was even lower! It seems the reheated starch had become even more resistant to digestion. This has several important implications.
Controlling glucose levels in the blood is very important for people with diabetes; this could have important quality of life results. Making starch harder to digest reduces the amount of calories absorbed - better for weight control - and does further beneficial things as it passes through the gut. It acts more like fiber, and adding fiber to the diet has been known to have beneficial effects for some time now, including keeping the bacteria in the gut happy. (No free lunch though - people with irritable bowel syndrome may have problems with resistant starch. Links courtesy of the BBC.)
Granted, this was a small sample - but the same effect was seen in all of the volunteers. Read the article and watch the video at the BBC link, and see for yourself. There's a recap of the show in a separate BBC story with this added information:
Denise is now going to continue her research - funded by Diabetes UK - looking at whether, even without other dietary modifications, adding resistant starch to the diet can improve some of the blood results associated with diabetes.
Chris was certainly blown away by this finding.
"We've made a brand new discovery on Trust Me I'm A Doctor", he says, "and it's something that could simply and easily improve health. We can convert a carb-loaded meal into a more healthy fibre-loaded one instead without changing a single ingredient, just the temperature. In other words our leftovers could be healthier for us than the original meal."
This is one of those things that sounds too good to be true - but it looks genuine and the theory under it is sound enough. And, it's something you can try at home! Well, maybe not the blood sampling part - but the cooling and reheating is easy enough.
Enjoy!