> the popular 21st-century view that heavy pasta meals leave diners feeling equally heavy and lethargic.
Pasta gets a bad rap unfairly, I think. A few years ago over the course of ~18 months, I lost 100 lbs. I ate pasta almost every day when I did this.
One problem, particularly in the US, is that portion sizes are so large. This affects much more than just pasta. But in the American mind, a serving of pasta is often easily 3x what it should be. A small plate of pasta, maybe pancetta, some cheese and an egg? Filling, but also can be light.
Yup. When I was boxing my coach started me on weight loss and recommended pasta or rice for dinner with the serving size being that of a small bowl and not "heap the plate and pile the rest of the food on top"
Carbs are energy. You just have to be sure to only eat what you need and actually use the energy. Otherwise the body starts storing it as fat. And like you said small portions of fatty things like cheese and eggs are perfectly fine as long as you burn what you eat.
As an Italian, my experience is that I can’t have any satisfaction with less than 180g of pasta.
Therefore I only eat it like once a week and make it a little event. Growing up I had similar portions almost on a daily basis and I was never overweight. Trick: do sports. A lot.
I eat 80gr of pasta, a bit more at the restaurant (they make larger portions), I hate big bowls of pasta and have it no more than 2/3 times a week, usually less.
Pasta is a kind of food you have to eat and then wait that gastric acids kick in to take the hunger away
If you're trying to eat pasta until it makes you feel full, you're having too much of it.
Pasta releases water over time and too much of it will also make you very sleepy, especially after lunch.
That's why there is a tradition in Italy of not working too much after lunch and shops used to reopen in the afternoon at 16.
People had too much pasta (they had not much more to eat, until they had it)
But if you eat it once a week I guess it's ok, my grandma used to eat pasta with bread everyday and she lived 96 years...
I did a lot of sport in the past, it doesn't really keep your weight down, to lose weight doing sport, while also eating a lot without limits, you should do it 12 hours a day.
I was luck enough to be born genetically skinny, but now that we are older many of my friends are fighting against weight daily, despite being professional players on a strict diet until their 30s.
Portions with 125g of uncooked pasta feel fine to me. That‘s 450 calories. Plus sauce (200 on the low end, 350 calories on the high end, depending on what exactly you want to eat – 200 calories would be something like a 400g can of tomatoes, garlic, onions, some olive oil) and cheese (100 calories for 25g Parmesan) you end up with a meal that‘s between 750 and 900 calories.
That between a normal and large-ish meal, though in both cases not exactly huge. Definitely something you could conceivably eat every day without much trouble, though I do agree that something with less carbs would probably be a bit more filling.
125g uncooked dried pasta should be about 280g cooked pasta.
Don’t get me wrong, I can eat 180g of uncooked pasta no problem. But that tends to go right up to the line of feeling very full.
Uncooked.
depends on the pasta type though.
Spaghetti can be easily 180g.
Penne, Fusilli or Rigatoni, let's say 150g.
My sauces are generally quite light. I'm vegetarian, so they never involve calorie-dense ingredients such as guanciale or pancetta. (I know, I know, what am I missing and so on... :D)
For me pasta means less ingredients as possible, at the highest possible quality.
Examples: Fresh Tomato-Basil Spaghetti.
I use only spaghetti from selected Italian brands such as De Cecco - low end but extremely good in my opinion - Rummo or Gentile, organic Tomatoes from a fresh food store, my own home-grown basil, extra virgin olive oil from Calabria, chili also from Calabria, extra-fine tomato extract from Mutti.
Fettucelle burro e limone: Fettuccelle DeCecco, Irish butter, Bio shallots, Phu Quoc black pepper, organic Lemons (from Sorrento when in Italy, just bio when here in Germany) for the juice and the zest.
Fusilli or Rigatoni alla Norma. Organic tomato sauce from Mutti with pieces of tomatoes, organic aubergines from Italy, same olive oil from Calabria, same chili from calabria, my own basil...
And so on: Aglio e Olio e Peperoncino, Arrabbiata, Puttanesca, Pasta all'aglione, ecc.. The sauce is never heavy, and the pasta itself can shine.
As you can see I also never cook pasta as an afterthought. This way, you can definitely control how much you eat.
Habits subjected to radically change when I visit mamma e babbo back in Italy.
Don’t get me wrong, 180g is no problem for me, I can even over-indulge and go for more, but that insures feeling disgusting afterwards (in that sense 180g seems like a pretty good delineator between large but possible and too much).
Currently I’m losing weight (very necessary) so I’m hyper-aware of portion size and while the first couple of weeks 125g portions felt unimaginably small I think I got used to them and they don’t leave me back empty anymore. But, yeah, not as filling as something with much more vegetables and, say, tofu and some rice.
You nearly had me, but then wouldn't the same quantity absorb the same amount of water? I've no idea really, but wouldn't you serve the same quantity of sauce with the pasta?
That seems like a pretty good rule of thumb. I tend to eat a bit less than that. If I'm planning for a group doing some activity like strenuous hiking, I'll plan for a bit more. But 4-5 people to a box/pound sounds about right.
I'm trying to get an understanding of the portions that you guys are talking about. Am I correct that:
125g would be roughly .3 liters or 1.25 cups of a pasta like spaghetti (i.e. one that isn't hollow so it fills up most of the available space)
25g of cheese would be just enough to melt and form a thin layer over the top of the pasta
I think that I would want some meatballs or cubed chicken (or a vegetarian equivalent) to feel satisfied. However, I also probably wouldn't add the cheese so maybe it equals out somewhat.
Cool video! It's very easy to do (provided you have the ingredients). The serving in the video seems to be for 3 people. It's a really greasy dish, there's no way you can eat all of that alone.
While cutting the guanciale he says "quite a lot for two people" and later while adding eggs he says "for two people you take two eggs" so it must be intended as a portion for two.
I (an Englishman) ate large portions of pasta until about 5 years ago when someone suggested weighing it and now I use 85g per portion. It never seems like it's going to be enough, but it always is.
If that's uncooked pasta, that's about 650+ calories, right? If the sauce ain't too heavy and that's the main dish of the day, even without sports that shouldn't be a big issue.
I eat 250g (uncooked) alone. Add to that sauce and vegetables, sometimes meat.
I'm nearly forty, and 1,74m and weigh between 76 and 78 kg (depending on the time of the year). I'm a software developer and only do loaded carries three times a week.
My wife always asks where all the calories go ;-).
As a student, when I ate nothing else during the day, my standard amount for dinner was 125g (so you get 4 meals out of a standard package). When combined with vegetables, it is more than enough.
That's amusing on one level, but I do know that many struggle to create a caloric deficit, and some foods do seem to make it easier to feel full with less.
Nice. It’s still good to have these methods for achieving the ultimate goal, people just need to stop presenting whatever works for them as the one true way.
Yes, it is true that they have the same qualitative goal of creating a caloric deficit. However, some diet patterns slow down the metabolism more than others, which heavily impacts the likelihood of success in creating a significant (quantitative) caloric deficit
> One problem, particularly in the US, is that portion sizes are so large.
This is true for every food in the US..
(I'm an overweight French guy who eat too much but in the US even the "small" portions were far too much for me)
> One problem, particularly in the US, is that portion sizes are so large.
Portion size was the key for me. I stopped feeling heavy and lethargic after pasta meals once I started weighting my pasta before eating.
This made a world of difference on my state after eating and, by contrast, helped me realise how heavy I usually felt after eating (80g of uncooked pasta seem to be a good balance for me).
When I cooked professionally in Rome, we weighed out 50g for Italians and 100g for Americans in terms of planning large buffet/group lunches (combined with options for soup and 6-7 different salad or veggie dishes).
This is why food bans are bad. The same thing that harms one person can work for someone else.
Even something like Bloomberg's ban on large sodas is probably heavy handed. Sugar is not always a poison. It can be a valuable fuel, even at large quantities (and large sizes can also add a lot of convenience to some people's lives).
The problem is the sugar is addictive, abused by 99% of its users and it provides no benefit. In what cases is soda a valuable fuel that couldn't be replaced by something more natural and healthy?
Just because someone who is burning 2,000 calories is drinking a small bottle doesn't mean it is appropriate to drink 2L everyday. Everything in moderation.
Purely anecdotal and unscientific, but a few years ago I watched a documentary in which a TV team followed identical twins. One of them only ate pasta-based meals for a month, the other only ate potato-based meals (if I remember correctly, they made sure that both meals where basically the same, modulo potato/pasta). They checked blood results, BMI, etc. before and after the diet. The potato-eating twin gained a few kilos and had generally worse blood results than the pasta-eating twin, who kept her weight. Interestingly, the potato-eating twin hated potatoes after 4 weeks of eating them and had to force herself to touch them at the end, while the pasta-eating twin still liked pasta.
I love these events that makes food, cuisine and gastronomy political.
In France, cuisine critics Gault et Millau attacked the fat, slow cooked, sauce heavy French cuisine for the same reason, opening the way for the new French cuisine "chefs". Pleasures of the senses over satiety.
Earlier, Etienne Auguste Parmentier used elaborate tactics to have the potato accepted by the population, from fake guards around the fields and pamphlets against the various roots people used to eat when low on wheat.
During the French Revolution, cuisine was also purged from its aristocratic attributes, prohibiting the unnecessary complexities. Maybe inspired by the Protestant reform culinary ethos where food should be fresh, humble and roborative.
Consider the weird lunacy of these folks - fine on the fringes, but very dangerous when let lose with raw ideas on civilisation.
Now consider that since probably the early 19th century this has always been happening.
Finally, consider that it's happening 'right now' - so which of the 'futurists' today are out to lunch, quite obviously so, we're just to 'caught up' to see it that way?
If buying (hard) pasta in the US make sure to look at the ingredients on the package and only buy pasta that lists only two ingredients: semolina and water.
Not sure why so many other ingredients are added here. The pasta with only semolina and water tastes much better.
You probably know that salt is often fortified with iodine. Quite a lot of other basic foodstuffs, including bread, rice, and pasta, are fortified with folic acid, iron, niacin, etc. It's a largely forgotten program of the USDA that has been wildly popular in reducing the incidence of nutritional diseases. I presume that's what you're referring to, because I just looked at the ingredients on the spaghetti boxes of the two most popular brands of pasta in the U.S., Barilla and Mueller's, and they only list wheat--semolina & durham, and durham, respectively. But they're both also fortified, with Mueller including that in the list of ingredients, and Barilla listing them separately as vitamins/minerals.
I understand it's de rigour to eat "pure" foods, but it's actually led to reduced intake of important nutrients in the wider population. For example, until very recently iodine wasn't included in prenatal vitamins because for much of the past century most people used fortified salt. But with the increased use of kosher salt in home kitchens, medical advice not to add too much salt when cooking, and the fact that prepackaged foods don't contain iodized salt, iodine intake began to drop in the United States and UK.
I have diabetes. For me, pasta is in the "normal" range.
"Fast" -- candy, soda, etc. Hits in 20 mins and is gone in 2.5 hrs.
"Normal" -- pasta, a sandwich, rice, etc. Hits in 30-45 mins and is gone in 4/5 hrs
"Slow" -- high fat foods, peanut butter, meats, etc. hits in ~2h and is gone in 7-9
Made a little chart (†). The area under those curves is the same for the same g of carbohydrate but the shape is different.
The thing is, pasta is heavy. Compared to most meals it's dense and almost pure carbohydrate. So if you have even a little bit of insulin resistance you will definitely feel it.
Then there's alcohol, that lives in the complete opposite corner: a shot of vodka hits in the "fast" category but then actually lowers the BG later on.
Practitioners of intermittent fasting and keto diet claim we have more mental clarity when we are in ketosis.
During the experiment I made a homemade pizza with about 300 g of flour. After eating it I experienced brain-fog and I was not able to focus on reading a book that evening.
That likely very much depends on the individual. Personally I'm probably mildly hypoglycemic; I get brain-fog if I haven't eaten in a while - eating some fast carbs lifts the brain-fog.
Yes. I get my carbs from vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, carrot, tomato, and kale.
Fruits like banana, apples and clementine appears to be fine.
The highest glucose I measured was after a parsimon.
I tested potatoes as a part of a meal, and it gave a small and short elevation.
I tried rice twice and it gave a high but short elevation.
Sequencing also appears to be important. Start the meal with fat and protein and finish with carbs. The French desert is a good idea. Bread as an appetiser at restaurants is a bad idea.
"Pasta, he said, was a “passéist food” that “[deluded people] into thinking it [was] nutritious” and made them “heavy, brutish,” “skeptical, slow, [and] pessimistic.” "
all very (subjectively) true. As a pasta fanatic I try to eat Kamut pasta as often as possible as it leaves much less of a lethargic and carby aftermath.
Futurists were the most punk rock artistic movement before punk rock happened in the 70s. They even invented Industrial noise before Throbbing Gristle with Russolo's "Art of Noises" and orchestra of noise makers. The interesting thing about them is while they enjoyed shocking people and beating up their artistic rivals, they weren't nihilists like punks were: they were punk rock for technological progress rather than sticking bolts through their noses in defiance of de-industrialization.
"Pasta is a cruel and brutalizing food that makes you lazy and sentimental."
The post-Fascist futurists had a lot going for them as well - especially the Soviets, who basically created the foundation for modern electronic music.
Might depend on your country certainly the UK Punk /new wave, ska two tone scene was very political and 99% progressive (Morrisey being the one stand out)
OI certainly had a strong association with hard right politics - but that was a bit later.
A punk-like movement is a product of its time and opposed to the status quo. Modern punk and Futurism are a similar idea borne out of a very different substrate.
Of course it's easy in retrospect to note that (Italian) fascists and Futurist groups did cross paths during their ascent, but that does not mean that Futurism was fascist in its philosophy.
This is ahistorical. Marinetti‘s futurism was extremely fascist. His Futurist party merged with the Fascist party. He wrote the Futurist manifesto and co-wrote the Fascist manifesto.
The Futurist manifesto has “gems” such as:
“We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.”
They were also the first to notice, in writing in any case, that the world around them now sounded of machines so why not use that in music? Much like, our lives are increasing electronic, and so is so much now of the music we listen to. We truly reflect the world around us in our creative expressions.
Popularity of pasta in Italy is part of nation's accumulated wisdom. Pasta is popular simply because it _works_. It gradually releases water over time. This makes it very popular among marathon runners for example. Pasta's dietary properties make it very popular in notoriously sunny Italy, where activity slows down during midday.
> Let me say something shouldn't be brushed off lightly while brushing it off lightly. Clueless.
Marinetti was literally a member of the Fascist movement -- not "had ties with it", he was a legit, card-carrying member of the Italian Fascist Party, which he joined when the party he founded, the Futurist Political Party, merged with Mussolini's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. He was one of the more notorious of Mussolini's supporters early on, and he literally wrote a book called Futurismo e Fascismo ("Futurism and Fascism") -- guess what that book was about. They didn't quite get along but Marinetti, like most Italian Futurists, remained a keen fascist supporter throughout his life.
I think the claim is that futurists lived to ruffle feathers and that their fascism is an example of this. Thus fascism is placed in the class of things that “ruffle feathers”.
Noodle is apparently: "late 18th century: from German Nudel, of unknown origin." (Google)
However: "Although popular legend claims Marco Polo introduced pasta to Italy following his exploration of the Far East in the late 13th century, pasta can be traced back as far as the 4th century B.C., where an Etruscan tomb showed a group of natives making what appears to be pasta." (wikipedia)
Personally I've never referred to Spaghetti as noodles, and noodles to me means long thin things you put in stir-fry/ramen. Plus, there's many other shapes of pasta other than "noodle" shaped.
> And pasta is anti-virile because a heavy, bloated stomach does not encourage physical enthusiasm for a woman, nor favour the possibility of possessing her at any time.
This might be time-appropriate for 1930, but leaving that drivel uncommented perpetuates the oppression and violence immanent in it.
You're suggesting there exists someone who might read this interesting morsel of history and walk away, convinced by the excerpts, with anti-pasta views accompanied by a superstition that has them avoiding Italian cuisine on their first date unless warned otherwise.
Seems quite far-fetched. Though who are we to stop such a gentleman from sparing a woman some indigestion after reading a 1930s dating tip?
"E la pastasciutta è antivirile perchè lo stomaco appesantito ed ingombro non è mai favorevole all’entusiasmo fisico per la donna e alla possibilità di possederla dirittamente."
So it's indeed saying "possessing her", though a more idiomatic translation would probably be to say "taking her", since "possess" is rarely used as a term for sex at least in modern English.
The German fascists had very strong health and diet advice too. Turns out that because exercise was recommended by the Nazis, a good anti fascist shouldn't do anything strenuous.
Everything dates back to post-ww2. One of the key people was Ancel Keys. He falsified data and excluded significant data from his studies in order to push a narrative that saturated fats were bad for you. That eating plants was the only healthy way forward. Then the governments around the world pushed out their food pyramids that reinforced this idea.
We then had obvious paradoxes where in neighbours like France and Italy were the complete opposite reality. France with high fat had very low coronary heart disease and Italy which was low fat had high coronary heart disease.
There was no paradox, the science was fraudulent. Over the last several decades they have debunked and disproven this several times.
The fix for bad science is better science. this is over. We know all the health risks are from carbohydrates. This has been a fact for decades. Yet we sit here and grocery stores are 90% carbs. If we eliminate carbs from society, the food industry collapses >90%. Millions upon millions of jobs are headed to unemployment. worse yet, the majority of these people have no other skills.
We as a society basically cannot afford to stop eating carbs. Nobody will be cutting carbs out of their diet.
2009: Sugar: The Bitter Truth, Robert Lustig (MD, PhD)
There's significant studies done in the last 10 years. We know for a fact that carbs/sugar are the problem. Virtually all diabetes associations now push low carb diets.
I suspect these citations will mean nothing, I'm down around -10 for this post. Like I said, going to be huge amounts of resistance to this one.
Pasta gets a bad rap unfairly, I think. A few years ago over the course of ~18 months, I lost 100 lbs. I ate pasta almost every day when I did this.
One problem, particularly in the US, is that portion sizes are so large. This affects much more than just pasta. But in the American mind, a serving of pasta is often easily 3x what it should be. A small plate of pasta, maybe pancetta, some cheese and an egg? Filling, but also can be light.