Can You REALLY Make Pasta More Diet-Friendly By Reheating It?

You might want to stop ignoring those leftovers in your fridge. An experiment on the BBC show Trust Me, I'm a Doctor suggests that cooling and then reheating your pasta can actually make it healthier.

In the experiment, the show's host, Chris Van Tulleken, an infectious-disease doctor and research fellow at University College London Hospital, teamed up with Denise Robertson, Ph.D., a senior nutrition scientist at the University of Surrey, to see how people's blood-sugar levels responded to pasta leftovers. On three different days (spread out over the course of several weeks), nine volunteers ate hot, cold, or reheated pasta and then gave blood samples every 15 minutes for two hours.

The results: Diners experienced smaller spikes in their blood sugar and insulin levels when they ate cold pasta versus the freshly boiled kind. And when participants ate pasta that had been cooked, cooled, and then reheated, their blood-sugar levels were even more stable. The experts on the show claim that, compared to eating freshly cooked pasta, reheated pasta results in a 50 percent lower rise in blood sugar.

Call it weird (and amazing!) science. "When cooked starches cool, molecules known as amylopectin and amylose can go through a process called retrogradation in which they rearrange and create different structures, including resistant starch," says dietician Jaime Mass, R.D., president of Jaime Mass Nutritionals.

Resistant starch acts similarly to fiber in the digestive tract, traveling to the large intestine undigested and calming the blood sugar spike that typically accompanies the digestion of simple carbs, she says.

But will reheating your pasta make even more of a difference? "This is not fully understood, and most scientists say that when reheated, the food will revert back closer to its original form with less resistant starch," says Mass, who notes it also wise to take this experiment with a healthy dose of skepticism since it was small and not especially scientific.

So for now, if you want to up your pasta's resistant starch content, you might just want to eat cold pasta salad—just remember it's no excuse to eat an entire box of pasta in one sitting. You still need to watch your portion sizes, especially if you're trying to lose weight.

Or better yet, opt for whole-wheat pasta, which contains loads of both resistant starch and fiber to keep blood-sugar levels steady, boost your satiety, and promote weight loss.

More from Women’s Health:
3 Simple Ways to Make Zucchini Pasta
The 10 Easiest Pasta Meals Ever
The Best Carbs for Weight Loss

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