New year, new you, new diet. It’s a familiar refrain. One popular dieting technique is to create a food blacklist. Quitting “carbs” or packaged foods is common, which can mean avoiding supermarket staples like pasta.
But do we really need to ban pasta to improve our diets?
This is what we call a reductionist approach to nutrition, where we describe a food based on just one of its key components. Pasta isn’t just carbohydrates. One cup (about 145 grams) of cooked pasta has about 38g of carbohydrates, 7.7g of protein and 0.6g of fats. Plus, there’s all the water that is absorbed from cooking and lots of vitamins and minerals….