Pasta Makes You Skinny! lol

[OCDOC]

Great study showing how pasta makes you thin!! Or maybe not...

http://www.nature.com/nutd/journal/v6/n7/full/nutd201620a.html#tbl3

Sponsored in part by Barilla pasta, although they don't bother disclosing this..red flag #1.

Obesity in Italy is as bad as North America (from the paper):

"The prevalence of overweight and obesity was 35.7% and 27.7% in women and 50.4% and 29.0% in men, respectively (P for gender difference<0.001).".. red flag#2.

The raw data showed that OW/obese people ate more pasta per day than slim people..red flag#3.

All bad, but no problem! Crunch the data! 🙂

Instead of simply admitting that fat people eat too much pasta, show that pasta grams per kilo body weight is LESS for fat people..the fatter you are, the smaller the number..eureka! red flag#4.

Throw in that one can assume obese women were likely to 'mis-report' their eating habits (ie, call them liars and substitute data you like), and all is good! Yay! red flag#5

At least the authors had enough shame to admit that the 'healthy' people only ate about 3 ounces of pasta a day (small appetizer size), AND mention that the overall MED diet with exercise was followed better by fit people.

How this kind of junk gets past peer review baffles me.

Anyway, the takeaway is that healthy Italians eat maybe 3 ounces of pasta per day, exercise, and eat healthy oils, nuts, fish, etc. The rest are fat like the rest of us...

[A_Lurker]

@DerrickS - I bought one back in February.  I used it a bit, but I cook meals for someone else that actually needs to have more calories, so the meals were too low calorie.  Also, I usually just make a small portion of pasta for myself (so I'm not making two different meals).  In the fall/winter, once the garden and outside stuff is done I will likely play with it more.

[Dominique · Accepted solution]

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@OCDOC wrote:

Obesity in Italy is as bad as North America (from the paper):

"The prevalence of overweight and obesity was 35.7% and 27.7% in women and 50.4% and 29.0% in men, respectively (P for gender difference<0.001).".. red flag#2.

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It should read: "Obesity in the tiny subset of the Italian population used for the study".

Population-wide stats (e.g. these ones from OECD) show Italy actually has one of the lowest obesity rate among rich countries. Granted, the numbers for Italy (and most other European countries) are self-reported data (as opposed to measured for North America), but anyone who has visited both Italy and the USA (I would qualify, as an outsider in both cases) can confirm – based on random observations at public places – the order of magnitude is right.

I could conduct my own studies showing that any given food item can make you either thin or fat: it all depends on how little or how much of it you eat, in relation to your total energy expenditure. Anyway, studies focusing on just one item have little practical value, because even people who have very little variety in their diet eat at least half a dozen of other items.

Many Italian people who have a normal weight eat pasta, pizza, bread, rice, polenta etc. on a daily basis. It’s all about portion size and the things that go with them. It’s very uncommon in an Italian restaurant to get a "to-go box", while it’s more or less the norm in the US. If a normal person can get three meals from an average serving at a restaurant, I guess this provides clues portion sizes are not right.