How to add right amount of pasta to a healthy diet

For many people, a steaming bowl of spaghetti and meatballs or baked ziti with cheese is the ultimate in comfort food — but is pasta a dietary disaster? At 210 calories per 250 millilitres (one cup), it isn't especially low in calories, and of course, it's high in carbs. Here are some tips on eating a healthy dose of pasta.

Pasta's reputation as fattening is undeserved.

• Eat pasta in moderation, without high-fat sauces, and it won't pad your waistline.
• Bread is severely restricted on most low-carb diets on the theory that it makes you fat.
• There is some truth to the idea that starchy and highly refined carbohydrate foods, such as white bread, white rice and potatoes, work against weight control by sending blood sugar soaring, only to crash and make you ravenous again in no time.

A system called the glycemic index (GI) ranks foods on a scale of one to 100 according to how much they cause blood sugar to rise.

• A slice of white bread can have a GI value as high as 80,
• Spaghetti's GI value is a modest 44
• Fettuccine checks in at a GI value of 46
• Macaroni's GI is just 47

How can that be? After all, aren't bread and pasta both made from wheat? Yes — but not the same kind of wheat.

• Most pasta is made from durum wheat or another type of hard wheat, and that wheat is coarsely ground into what's known as semolina.
• The enzymes in the digestive system aren't very good at breaking down the starch in semolina and turning it into blood sugar, so when most people eat a reasonable amount of pasta, their blood sugar doesn't soar.

Of course, eating huge portions of pasta, or any food, will make you gain weight. And drowning your pasta with sauces that contain butter, cream, cheese and other high-fat foods will make the noodles' low GI value irrelevant.

• To maintain pasta's low GI value, cook it al dente, that is, a noodle should give a little resistance when you bite into it and not be mushy.
• Overcooked pasta has a higher GI because its starch granules expand, which makes it easier for the digestive enzymes in your system to break them down and turn them into blood sugar.

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