Is wholeweat pasta less fattening?

[Russiawithlove]

Sorry if this is a thick question. Trying to low carb and I've bought some wholeweat pasta and rice as supposed to be healthier.
I've got PMT and am craving carbs. Will this be ok or is it still fattening?

It must be better for you. No one would choose to eat it if it wasn't.

I much prefer wholegrain versions, they have more texture. White bread, white rice = yuck for me.

You can improve the carb content by cooking the pasta in advance, letting it go cold and heating it up again. It creates more resistant starch or something! Still not good when low-carbing but helps a little

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.diabetes.org.uk/guide-to-diabetes/enjoy-food/carbohydrates-and-diabetes/carbs-and-cooking%3famp

It’s Christmas though, enjoy your pasta!

Carbohydrates aren't fattening, being in a calorie surplus (energy in higher than energy out) is what causes weight to be put on

Is definitely not true!!!

What are you on about BIWI? The above is a literal description of how we gain weight: we eat more than we burn. Has this science changed recently?

@UserX
I believe Biwi is flagging the different effect carbs have on our insulin production.
In that respect a calorie in, and calorie expended, isn't the same when it comes to weightloss and weight gain. If you google the effect of insulin on weight gain, it will explain it better than I can.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29629761 they did an experiment and found cooling and reheating makes it less carby

Has the science changed recently?
Not recently, it's quite 'old' science now, but it's been resisted a lot. It's actually incredible how we have been lied to and hoodwinked over the sugars and fructose in our foods and the impact of them on major diseases. Lustig's Fat Chance is a very readable account of it if anyone's interested, but there's literally tonnes of info out there. In my experience people are very reluctant to accept the damage that carbs (whole grain or whole meal or otherwise) do to our health.

How are you doing low carb and eating pasta?

The point of low carb is to lower your insulin response. High insulin does make you fat.

There's some pretty good content online about the "Low Carb cult". For those who are interested. I've been trying to think how to describe the passionate zealots.

Low/no carb is bad for your health, especially if you are replacing carbs with red meat, processed meat eg bacon and high fat dairy products.

Longitudinal study shows it can take years off your life as well as being bad for the environment, expensive and hard to maintain.

Have a moderate amount of pasta with a good amount of protein and enjoy it!

Low carb is not bad for your health.

There is no such thing as an essential carb

Red meat is one of the most nutritionally rich foods we can eat. This may not sit well with modern morality but our bodies have evolved over thousands of years to eat meat for maximum nutrition. We weren’t thinking of Daisy the Cow’s feelings at the time, but our bodies are evolved to eat meat

Also animal fat is not bad for you and doesn’t make you fat

They’ve been trying to get this link between fat and bad health for years and it doesn’t exist.

Add carbs to fat though.....different story

I get impression our bodies evolved for red meat to be a small part of out total diet, like 5-8% of total calories. Not large % of total calories.

Also, when you probably die before 35yo, there isn't much chance for chronic diseases to manifest. The meat we had when evolving was physically hard work to get & prepare and very lean. If you work super hard to get & prepare your meat, you get benefits (& risks) from that work, quite different from cellophane wrapped dump on the grill experience.

But at least modern meat purchase & prep brings very low risk of infecting you with something nasty.

There is no denying that medical advances have improved our longevity, particularly antibiotics

But our bodies are simply not designed to eat a high carbohydrate diet. The obesity and diabetes numbers will tell you that very quickly.

Anyone who thinks a calorie is a calorie simply hasn’t done their research

A study done by a guy called Ancel Keys is where this 'fat is bad for you' myth came from. It's been demonstrated now that he just omitted countries with high fat consumption and low incidence of heart disease from his data. The whole lot is flawed. It's been pedalled as truth for decades, but current studies continue to show that a lower carb diet significantly reduces the risk of metabolic syndrome- a condition linked with heart attacks, strokes, hypertension, diabetes, and dementia (thought to be accelerated by insulin resistance to the brain), among others.

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin

The obesity and diabetes numbers will tell you that very quickly.

Have you got some links to this research?

Harvard university has used evidence based studies to produce a plate which is different to that of either the US or UK government. I think it's much better. It does not rule out carbs st all, but says they should be whole carbs. That is how I eat:

www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-plate/

I reprint the Harvard Uni plate advice here. I point out that they say that advice is based on THREE (count 'em, THREE) studies: White Hall civil servants, Women's Health initiative & a combined similar dataset. Overwhelmingly American, mostly relatively affluent participants. That doesn't undermine the advice but rather to say that the evidence base is fairly limited, whether or not HU endorses it.

Same advice has been summarised elsewhere as "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

This article published in 2001 talks about what went wrong with mainstream dietary advice, in making fat out to be a big villain based on poor quality evidence (while ignoring problems linked to high carbs). It actually took decades of campaigning for the anti-fat advice to become mainstream, so I guess we are in the middle of a long & equally unbalanced campaign about high carbs. I will try to ignore the high carb hysterics just like I did the high fat hysterics.

There are glaring inaccuracies for me with the Harvard plate though, unfortunately. The biggest being that the carbs it suggests to eat are 'whole grains' and yet there is confusion regarding what whole grain actually is and it's a definition which is exploited by manufacturers. To get the full metabolic effect of fibre, it needs to 'coat' the starch on all sides do that the digestive system has to do the work to strip it away. Once you strip away the outer, you are left with starch (glucose). When you ingest a 'whole kernel' grain, you slowly strip away the fibre, meaning it is digested more slowly and therefore less glucose rise occurs. In my edition of Lustig, it states: there is nothing in the IOM's definition of whole grain that stated that the grain must be 'whole' (uncracked, uncrushed, unadulterated) plus the foods that list whole grain content may have as little as 1%.

If you are able to actually find true wholegrain foods, and they really do form 1/4 of your diet then that's excellent, but they certainly don't exist in brown pasta, brown rice or brown bread in any quantity and it's unlikely that the average shopper is going to be able to get sufficient whole grain in their diets.

The other issue with the Harvard plate is the advice to drink fruit juice (which has more sugar than coke) and to limit sugary drinks, which is likely to negate any positive effects of the tiny amount of whole grains anyway.

Here’s a bbc article about the longitudinal study I mentioned, with ref low carb being potentially bad for your health. It’s from this year, not 2001, so more up to date. The original study was published in The Lancet.

Danger but the diet they are suggesting there as the optimum is a typical low carb diet. Not many people I know who do LCHF eat only meat and animal fat. We eat nuts, avocado, oily fish, legumes , lots of veg, limited fruit and cut out refined sugar and refined starches like cereals and pasta/rice/potatoes. It's a fallacy that to do a low carb diet you need to eat lashings of cream and tonnes of red meat. Atkins has been widely refuted, (and I'm not 100% sure but I believe he died of a heart attack) but low carb and Atkins are not the same. This article confirms what low carb dieters have always said- get your carbs from leafy veg, in its whole form, with fibre, and eat it with good fats from plant and animal sources.

The BBC say “moderate” carb corresponds to the NHS eat well plate for amounts of carbs, and the “plant based” low carb in the actual study includes whole wheat breads as sources of protein.

They say moderate carb is best but if you are going low carb to go plant based. So if you’re low carb and basically vegan you might be ok...but meat eating, not so. From the zealous low carb ppl there is always a lot of talk of eggs, cheese, meat, and not a lot of talk about tofu.

No Atkins didn't die of a heart attack. He slipped and fell and banged his head on the ice.

And @dangermouseisace I'm guessing you'd include me as a low carb zealot but I always advocate people getting their carbs from vegetables and salad, as well as some fruit.

But not tofu because I don't like it

Ah biwi is that an urban legend then?! I never knew that! I guess the point I was making is that Atkins is quite commonly considered to be unhealthy long term.

But most long term low carb eaters I know don't do Atkins. We do eat (some) carbs, like you say, mostly vegetables. I don't eat tofu either, because i don't like it. There's a huge spectrum of 'meat', and it's naive to assume that anyone who low carbs eats entirely greasy cuts of intensively farmed red meat with a side order of cheese.