Can eating pasta help you lose weight?

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Can eating pasta help you lose weight? A flurry of recent headlines on pasta and weight loss might make you think it can. But looking at the research behind these headlines shows that the science of dieting with pasta is not as simple as it might seem.

The study was a meta analysis of research exploring associations between low glycemic index diets and health - many of which substitute carbohydrates like potato and rice with pasta. And while it suggested that a pasta-rich diet does not lead to weight increase, it failed to conclusively show a link between pasta and health.

Much of the problem was that the low glycemic diets in the study were designed to be healthy alternates to high glycemic index diets, and as such, would have been expected to confer health benefits irrespective of the presence of pasta.

What results is a Jeopardy-like approach to research, where researchers start with the desired answer (pasta is good for you in this case), and use available evidence to craft a question that gives them that answer.

USEFUL LINKS
Original research paper:

Pasta Is Good For You, Say Scientists Funded By Big Pasta – Buzzfeed
ASU Risk Innovation Lab:
School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University

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