Pasta: Is it really fattening?

The average Italian eats 36 kilos pasta per year. In our country, more than 60 million tons of cereals are consumed every year, mostly wheat flour to make pasta and bread.
It is fairly easy to calculate such an amount - although it would be unknown to many people: in fact, our land cannot provide but a relatively small quantity of such supply, therefore Italy has been for many years the biggest cereals importer in the world. We import more cereals than Russia and India do.

It is a record the wrong way round, although the biggest Italian traders for cereals can still influence the most important produce Exchange in the world, the one in Chicago.

The high consumption of pasta highlights a custom against the modern trend: in fact, the whole industrialized world tends to drop proteins of vegetable origin to turn to proteins of animal origin and to increase consumption of refined sugars instead of complex carbohydrates (starches). We, on the contrary, still have historical and economic reasons of taste and tradition

which give pasta the utmost importance on Italian tables. Nonetheless, many features of our favourite food, Italian "to the backbone", are still largely ignored or unknown; then, let us have a closer look at them:

pasta is an extremely well-balanced nourishment. 1 hg of good pasta contains 10 to 12 % proteins, while we find 18 to 20 % proteins in meat, and it provides about 350 calories, as many as the equivalent amount of corn or pork meat. Pasta is very easy to assimilate, provided it is cooked right: if it is overcooked, starch, being its main substance, undergoes modifications which will slow down digestion. That is why it is so important always to strain pasta "al dente" (slightly underdone).

That pasta is fattening is one of the most common nutritional superstition. A normal individual, i.e. somebody who is not undergoing a slimming diet, cannot put on weight with just a portion of pasta a day, but he gets fat if he eats too much of it or if he puts too much sauce on it. Few people are used to weighing pasta before cooking it: a portion of 80 grams row pasta is more than enough for an average individual.