DoctorOz: The Truth About Pasta and Weight Loss

It is the dinner table battle that you've been fighting way too long and you never end up the winner. Now, you all know the inner struggle that ends up in one of two ways. Either you're passing on the pasta that you really, really want and settling for a really sad salad, or you're giving in to those carbs, calling your name, only to be faced with a harsh dose of rigatoni regret later on. And that's why today we ask, is it finally time to end the war on pasta? Mark Shasker investigates. I mean, I trust you, obviously. You're a food truth go-to guy, but you've got to explain this study to me. I cannot believe that they found that the more pasta you ate, the thinner people got. The opposite of what we think? It makes no sense intuitively. This was a study published in Nature's Nutrition and Diabetes Journal, and what they found was that eating pasta was correlated with a thinner waistline and a lower BMI. Now, it should be stated this study was funded by a pasta company, so that makes us go, okay, well what's really going on? However, it was published in a very good journal, so it was peer-reviewed. That means a lot of scientists looked at the study and said, we think you did a good job. But let's just pull out a little bit from this particular study and let's talk about Italy. This is the country where pasta comes from. They eat a lot of pasta in Italy, and they have one of the lowest rates of obesity in the Western world. So I think that's telling us that maybe pasta is not the devil we think it is. All right, let's figure this out. So to get to know how Italians eat their pasta for weight loss and maybe other purposes, I thought I'd go to the expert. First thing they do is they help cook their pasta differently, making it al dente. So Pasquale is here, but Pasquale, he's from Italy. Who better to teach us about how Italians do things? How does al dente pasta make much of a difference? Who cares how much I cook the pasta? Exactly. We think this is all just a personal preference. How thick do you want your pasta to taste? But there's actually something going on here. The same way that al dente pasta is tougher on the tooth, it also takes longer to digest. You don't get that big spike of blood sugar. It slows things down. So it's actually, there's actually something behind it. Pasquale, how do you make it al dente to the tooth? Al dente, you need water, you need a lot of water to cook the pasta. Now over here, we got like a six quarter water. This, it's good. But more water you put in the pasta, it don't make too much starch. Oh. Now when the water boil, but when you start to put the water, you put on the stove and I use the salt. Now everybody say, how many tablespoon of salt do you use? This and that. I don't use a tablespoon. I always teaspoon. I never use a teaspoon. You just put your fingers in there? No, I do like this. That's enough. Oh, good. All right. That's better. Okay. That's good. I'm happy. Now everybody say, how many spoon? Maybe four spoon. All right. So you salt the water, you get the water to boil. Now does the boiling water bounce the pasta around so it doesn't stick? The water got to boil. When you put the pasta, the water got to boil. See the water not boil, the pasta start to die inside. See, it's the same thing when you cook the, let's just say some lobster. So the water not boil, you put over there, go like this, the water got to boil. Very memorable. Yes. Okay. All right. Now you see, now the water boil. Now this is the pasta. Already I know everybody say, oh, the pasta, it's penne, penne rigate. Yes. Okay. Now let's put the pasta. This is like maybe pound of penne. Yes. And we put it right inside. Pound of penne. Now you see, when in Italy I was working, you know, everybody know this, you know, everybody say, oh no, you're not supposed to do this. Let me take the pasta, and you put inside. Not good, right? Why not? Boils it. It cleans it up. Okay. We put inside. Okay. I want to put them in there. Okay. We give a nice turn. That's it. Now this, you got to cook, like I say, everybody say, oh, you got to cook for 10, 11 minutes. I don't look at the clock. I don't look at the, you know, the pull of the clock. Now we see when it boil. Look at my boil. We're not going to wait eight minutes, but in eight minutes, if we take it out, it would have looked like this. All right. So the science, Mark, on these two issues, the volume of pasta to the volume of water. Why do you have to have a lot more water than you think? You want a lot of water. If you don't have a lot of water and you dump your box of pasta in, it's going to cool it down. It's going to take a really long time for it to get back to the boil. And it's going to die. Just like Pasquale said. But the other thing is pasta releases starch into the water as it cooks. And if there's not much water, that water starts to get really thick wallpaper paste and your pasta tastes gooey and gummy. So really important to have hot water and a lot of it. It's like that one over there. It's gooey and no salt. That's your, Mark made that. He made that. Not me. He made that. I think. Now, you got one other tip that I want you to share with all of us about pasta and that's the changes temperature. Yeah. It turns out if you want to kind of lighten the carb load effect, cool your pasta. Turns out the enzymes that digest it take longer when the pasta has been cooled after you cook it. And that sounds really weird. People are like, well, who wants to eat cold pasta? Turns out we do it all the time. It's called pasta salad. Exactly. All right. So a lot more water than you think. Make sure that's boiling. So it bounces the pasta around and make sure that if you really want to be doing it right, maybe have the pasta salad instead of the regular pasta. Pasquale, thank you very much. God bless you. That's it? Yeah, you're done. Stay there. Guard that pasta. All right. Next way we got to do this smart, if you're going to copy the Italians, is think about pasta as an appetizer. So this is what the typical American pasta meal looks like. You've got your big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs. You've got garlic bread. Have a look at this. This is a festival of carbohydrates. We even got soda, even in the croutons, as you point out. Now let's look at the Italian pasta meal. This is what a lot of people don't realize is in Italy, they serve pasta as a starter. So they'll have a small serving. They'll follow it with some grilled chicken, perhaps grilled meat, grilled vegetables, a salad, a small dessert, a glass of red wine. Totally different way of eating pasta. Makes a difference. And I just want to note, and this is a big deal for me, the pasta is in place of the bread. You know, you go to a restaurant, you have a bun, two buns, some butter, instead of that, you get the pasta. That's the trade-off that they're making, which is why I think, overall, they're having protein. All right. Next. And this is a big breakthrough idea that I never understood, and I finally got it today. Please explain to everybody how the shape of pasta can be used to their advantage. Okay. It's not just random anymore. Pay attention to this. So let's look at rigatoni. This is a pasta shape we all know and love. Lot of air in there. Big holes, right? So you have a big bowl of rigatoni, and you think, oh, there's a lot of food there. Turns out there's not, because it's sort of plumped up by the air. But where it gets more interesting is how, in Italy, it's all about pairing it with the right sauce. So they're not really thinking about health. They're thinking about what's the best way to have the sensual enjoyment of the meal. So they would pair rigatoni with a thicker sauce, because the sauce can get inside there. Now, when you've got a thinner pasta, like spaghetti, they want a smoother, thinner sauce. You can kind of bask in that sauce. Otherwise, it gets too clumpy. It gets too clumpy. It plumps. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss out on new videos to live the good life.