What if we told you there was a ridiculously easy way to make your favorite pasta a little bit healthier?
Turns out by simply chilling cooked pasta for at least 24 hours, you can create a more fibrous food source that can help keep your blood sugar in check. Even better: Pasta isn’t the only starch this works for. And the effect is still potent even when you reheat. Sounds like magic, eh? Nope, just science.
What’s Starch Got To Do with It?
Starch is a complex carbohydrate that is broken down into glucose during digestion. When glucose is absorbed into the bloodstream, it’s transported all over the body to be used by our cells as energy. Over time, if our blood sugar levels are consistently too high, that can lead to diabetes and other complications.
A resistant starch is digested differently, behaving a bit like fiber in that it passes all the way through the small intestines — where it “resists” the enzymes that would usually break it down — to our large intestines, where it’s fermented by the good bacteria in our gut, producing compounds that have anti-inflammatory and protective benefits.
A lot of foods — bananas, lentils, whole or partly milled grains and seeds, legumes — already have resistant starches in them. But we can also create resistant starch by cooling certain carb-containing foods in a process known as retrogradation.
When these starches are cooked, often in water, they absorb some of that liquid. Their molecules spread out, which makes them softer and more digestible as they form a sort of gel. When cooked starches are cooled for 24 hours or more, they lose some of the moisture they gained in cooking, and the molecules start to recrystallize and organize in tight patterns. That more-organized structure is what creates resistance and makes it harder for our digestive enzymes to break them down. If we can’t digest it, it’s going to pass to the large intestine where it becomes food for our good bacteria.
But Wait, There’s More
First, you don’t have to eat that leftover pasta cold to get the benefits of retrogradation. While all foods differ in the amount of resistant starch they lose during reheating — there’s variation even among particular types of potatoes — if you do it gently with either a quick hit in the microwave or very light frying, you will retain most of the benefits. Don’t nuke the heck out of it or throw it back in a pot of boiling water or you’ll undo the process. (Or you can retain all the benefits with a chilled potato or pasta salad.)
Second, if you want to intensify the effect even more, choose a pasta that is made with resistant starches to start, like chickpeas, whole wheat or legumes.
Better, Not Best
The benefits brought by retrogradation can be observed in other cooled starches like white rice and potatoes. But there’s also a caution. (You saw that coming, didn’t you?)
Simply put, the benefits of retrogradation are nowhere near as potent as just eating more fiber. Look at retrogradation and resistant starch as a way to add some nutritional benefit back to beloved foods that we sometimes think of as no-no’s, or things we want to avoid if trying to control blood sugar.
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