Is reheated pasta less fattening? | Hacker News Reader

Is reheated pasta less fattening?

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55 pointsthret48 comments

When I was at school and University I was agnostic waterpolo player. It's a very intensive sport with 3 hours of workout per day, and some days double session. A intensive sport like this can totally change your relation with the food because you can eat everything you want. The problems arrived when I got my degree and I ended to play as agonistic. My body started to inflate like a ball, in few years I have gained 20-25 kilos. That was a big deal because I'm little and I have good muscle mass with broad shoulders, in other words I had look like a cubic. Loss weight is pretty simple, just go to a dietician and many kilos go away , but the hardest thing is after you finish the diet. During all my diets I was hungry and at the end I always got the my initial weight. I read a book about proteic diet and I tried it . Well I have lose 18 kg and it looks like I done an Fdisk on my body. Now I do not like pizza , pasta , because they do not give me the satisfaction as before. Also I discovered oat bran , that is great because it catchs the eaten fat and it deletes the your hungry. Just my experience

One possible takeaway here is that vigorous exercise for 2 to 3 hours, 5 or 6 days per week is a decent strategy.

There's a lot of petty optimization going on in the world of fitness and weight loss ... in reality you don't need a diet or a fitbit or a fashionable caveman lifestyle if you're just outside moving a lot.

Most people don't have the time to move.

If you want to change your body composition, you can do it entirely with the time you already use - eating - without having to do anything else.

I find fixing people's diet habits -- then pushing them into fitness once they have clean eating down pat as a habit, is much better than "just run it off"

Another takeaway is that if your activity level changes (for any reason) you need to be really proactive about changing your diet to match, which can be surprisingly difficult.

Appetite is like a thermostat that wants to maintain the status quo but one which isn't good at dealing with rapidly changing inputs.

> in reality you don't need a diet or a fitbit or a fashionable caveman lifestyle if you're just outside moving a lot.

A fitbit is a tool to remind you to be moving a lot, by measuring, tracking, and exposing an objective quantification of your success in doing that. So, sure, if you succeed in doing it without such a tool, you don't need the tool. That doesn't make the tool a "petty optimization".

2-3 hours? why not HIIT? get the same results with 3-5 min. a day

I've pretty much cut out sugar and most carbs for 4-5 years now. I was never fat, but I wanted to lose those 5 extra pounds around my hips that just seemed impossible to shed for me doing a standard, less caloric diet and lots of exercise. Cutting out sugars/breads worked wonders for me personally, and at stretches in life when I'm feeling really lazy and don't want to work out, it's way easier to regulate my body weight using a low-carb regimen and still be able to eat large, satisfying meals.

Agreed. The Four Hour Body's "Slow Carb Diet" completely changed my life. I was insulin insensitive and game from an Italian background of low-protein high carb.

I lost 30-35lbs in 3.5 months. It was unreal. The weight came off, without exercise, every day.

When I plateaued, I cut diet soda as a treat and the weightloss continued.

I got to 150lbs at 6'0 -- too skinny. Now I eat more Paleo, but still low carb and still eat some legumes (lentils!)

I don't subscribe to the calories in calories out model at all.

Everyone seems to discount body composition.

Someone eating 2,000calories of carbs is going to look AND feel a lot different than eating 2,000 calories of protein and carbs bound with fiber.

I hate the crowd here that subscribes to some sort of human body perfect thermodynamic engine. It's complete bullshit.

Congrats on such a long time sticking with it.

I've been on low carb 2 years, no wheat, down from 225 to 180 with 0 exercise, and I'm 34. In the middle of that stretch, I had a regression due to eating too much fat (fat bombs, sour cream, heavy cream, butter, etc.) and I bounced up.

So I decided to just eat protein and what fat comes naturally with it, and not add any extra pure fat, for as long as I'm trying to burn my own fat. And that's worked well - basically meat, eggs, cheese. In fact, I'm probably about done with the loss phase now. Yay!

And I don't get 'hangry' as my wife would say, due to blood sugar crashes, so mentally I'm much better.

> I had a regression due to eating too much fat (fat bombs, sour cream, heavy cream, butter, etc.)

I went through this phase too - at one point I was eating things for breakfast that even Ron Swanson would have thought was disgusting :)

Looks like this violates Betteridge's law of headlines!

Refined carbs may not have an immediately negative effect on your health, but they should be avoided if you want to live long and healthily. A lot of people look at carbs only from the perspective of diabetes, weight gain, and taxing your pancreas, but there's more - don't ignore glycation, which has harmful effects way beyond diabetes, which is considered to be "accelerated aging" due to AGEs [1]. My supplementation is specifically targeting AGEs and try to reduce fast carbs as much as possible. I love yams, cold potatoes with vinegar and cold rice (to get resistant starch), and raw fruits, so, I'm not saying carbs should be avoided at all, but definitely should be reduced to a bare minimum and in forms where you get more than just carbs - loads of phytochemicals. Commercial pasta and bread are terrible not only because of the carbs, but also because of the fortification - folic acid should be avoided as roughly 30% cannot metabolize it and free folic acid is without a doubt harmful - especially to Mexicans due to wide-spread methylation issues. If you have 23andMe, go check your methylation and detox profile here [2] (it's a free service). It was an eye-opening subject to me and explained much of the evidence why blindly (over)supplementing could be harmful!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_glycation_end-product

[2] https://geneticgenie.org/methylation-analysis/

I'm sure I got downvoted by a carbhead.

Did they use a sample size of 5?!

Has there been any relevant publications on this topic?

Using such a small sample size to draw any relevant conclusions is indeed a weird methodology. If their findings were to be true, I would surely try it out. For now this rather looks like one of those nutrition recommendations that have no real foundation in research. Sadly.

I see a lot of posts by the author curious as to why people downvoted -- is it okay if I ask? This seems like _the_ comment I would want to read if I had the option of selecting a tl;dr or general reaction. He's not even saying they're wrong, he's just saying that without using a larger sample size the recommendation isn't founded in research. This appears true -- it's primarily built from induction over other ideas.

Also, all of them had the variations in the same order, and the two ho ones were not blind-test.

And no control group were given the same dish the whole time.

it was actually a sample size of 10, at least according to the program, for those outside, here's a youtube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=_r... (jump to the results portion of program)

the first 15 minutes are about this experiment

Science has known about the different response to cold pasta for many years.

The programme got ten people to try an experiment with reheated pasta. You're right that it's a tiny sample size (and all the other flaws - no randomisation, no blinding, self testing, etc etc) but it's unusual to have such a strong result across every participant and so it should prompt someone to do some proper science on it.

Sadly, tv has a lot of this kind of "we tested this thing on 20 unblinded non randomised poorly controlled volunteers - and now we're saying THIS IS TRUTH".

The article appears to not answer the question. It makes claims that reheated pasta raises blood sugar more slowly, but seems to say nothing about if it's more fattening.

According to the article if your blood sugar does not spike, you stay full longer, reducing the overall amount of food you eat.

Which is no less than two testable statements, of which zero have any conclusive scientific evidence.

There's no need to reestablish all of science every time someone runs an informal experiment. Previously demonstrated results can be assumed to be valid.

That is not what I'm saying. These statements are formulated in a way to make them sound reasonable. But there are no (scientifically) previously demonstrated results. None at all. If you were to make specific statements, you would at least open the questions to further research.

Blood sugar spike = insulin response = insulin is a fat storage hormone = fat

The reason it raises blood sugar more slowly is because some of the carbohydrate is converted into, effectively, dietary fibre. That means you get fewer calories for the same serving size.

What I was wondering about this: the article says to have cooled the pasta overnigh. But does this work anyway if you cool it passing under cold water?

wait ... pasta is fattening? I eat pasta ALL THE TIME and I am far from "fat"

it is the effect of carbs: carbs->sugar->insulin-> fat

insulin is a powerful hormone which, among other things, sends a message to the body to store more fat instead of burning it

a sample size of 1 is hardly significant but you could be far from fat because of a number of reasons: you are young and/or have a high metabolism, you are active, your genes, you eat other foods which counter the carbs in pasta (fats and fiber), etc. there are a lot of variables

the ideal diet is one where your blood sugar is more or less constant throughout the day

the worst diet is one where your blood sugar spikes, forcing your pancreas to release insulin again and again

Myth #1

http://examine.com/blog/10-awful-myths-perpetuated-by-the-me...

The entry on the carbohydrate myth doesn't actually address insulin resistance but instead veers off on a tangent about gluten. It also cites no references. Can you provide a better source?

The site is full of references. Try clicking around.

And insulin resistance is an issue if you're overweight. For a normal person it's a non-issue.

I did click around, a lot. There are indeed many references, especially on the supplements pages, but I couldn't find any external links about carbohydrates and insulin.

And, regarding "for a normal person it's a non-issue" – How do you think those overweight people got overweight? I was once at a healthy weight, but my terrible diet got me where I am today. If I'd eaten differently, I wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.

the site is full of references? How about the page and "Myth" in question?

That's not true at all in my experience.

> And insulin resistance is an issue if you're overweight. For a normal person it's a non-issue.

68.5% of the US adult population is overweight [1], so even if it was only a problem for overweight people, in the US at least, overweight is normal. ("Normal" and "ideal" aren't the same thing.)

[1] Ogden C. L., Carroll, M. D., Kit, B.K., & Flegal K. M. (2014). Prevalence of childhood and adult obesity in the United States, 2011-2012. Journal of the American Medical Association, 311(8), 806-814.

It's a simple carbohydrate. So, depending on who you ask, it causes blood sugar spikes leading to insulin resistance, leaves you hungry again a few hours later, is addictive, and causes other maladies. Along with white bread, sugary drinks, cereals, etc., etc.

There are a lot of reasons one might not get fat, so a thin person who eats pasta is not surprising. But a fat person with a pasta addiction (like me) has a good idea where to start changing his diet.

Is non-white bread different?

Maybe, because it contains more fiber and less carbohydrate for the same amount of bread. Google gives a nice infobox on the subject for the query "white bread vs wheat bread".

I used to eat a lot of whole wheat bread until I discovered that its glycemic index is not that different and even more shocking, that it acts like a 'sponge' soaking up and removing many other useful vitamins, minerals and micro-nutrients from the gut

A minor correction: it's a complex carbohydrate.

What's your body fat percentage?

That's how I was until I hit my 30's. Insulin problems take a while to develop.

I've been on low carb, no wheat for 2 years now. It's been a miracle, really...

I might have to do this. I'm interested in your experience...If I may ask, how did you deal with cravings and any social implications? What's the outcome been, and did you change anything else?

as far as cravings - that's a bit strong of a word but here are some things I missed and was glad when I found a substitute:

* there's a really good pizza recipe that is just cheese for the crust. amazing. Its better than regular pizza, really.

* lasagna/spaghetti you can use zuchini or spaghetti squash as noodles, and can eat in a bowl (just a tad more soupy), still tastes great (again, I love italian)

* I went through a phase where I ate cheese crisps (microwaved cheese, super yummy like crackers) and made flaxseed wraps (like bread). I don't make either any more, just pointless work.

* Pork rinds are amazing - good with soup, like a cracker, like croutons for a salad, with guacamole, nachos, hummus, or peanut butter. (note that the last two are easy for me to indulge on, I just have to watch)

* I Make 24 eggs at a time as a fritatta, make a pork shoulder in the oven, braised chicken thighs, oven roasted whole chicken, big batches that have many servings.

* I used to eat cereal every day, I but got over that quickly enough - now it's just 2 eggs each morning (slice of fritatta).

* I like hamburgers, but usually just eat them plain with a few pickles on top. less messy, and frankly you taste the meat more.

* I gave up beer completely, which I used to drink with pizza. Now its just red wine once in a while.

I don't go out to restaurants much because frankly we have better food at home and admittedly they're not usually low carb oriented. But you can always get a burger without the bun. Or a gyro plate. Mexican fajitas (hold the tortillas and chips) are a winner too.

I started off reading the wheat belly blog, and after I lost 10 pounds I bought his book. I also recommend "The art and science of low carb living". There's also great vids on youtube of atkins & LCHF stuff. I also read william banting's old pamphlet for inspiration.

If fitness culture has "broscience", than this is its "highbrowscience" counterpart.

Why is everyone being downvoted for asking simple, inoffensive questions?

So low tar cigarettes are not as deadly as regular. Let's all have low tar cigarettes, because they're healthy.

Yeah, that's shamelessly ripped from Dr. William Davis, but it shows the logic problem.

I have to shake my head at people trying to run around the problem of carbohydrate intolerance by insisting theres a 'healthy way' to consume them. Any other food would have people advising you to stay the hell away from it if you're intolerant. But you know why carbs are different? Because they're so cheap, and governments for whatever reasons seem to want a large population (in more ways than one) rather than smaller, healthier ones.

Anywho, good luck to everyone doing the exact opposite of what the government funded "science" and corporate "health care" tell you what to do. It would be hard to do any worse...

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