Healthy Pasta Meals

Pasta meals are simultaneously ancient and contemporary; thousands of years ago our ancestors ground dried wheat and mixed it with water to make a wheat paste, and then boiled it to eat with meals. Today's families and chefs welcome pasta to their tables for its fine taste and familiar convenience, just as nutrition scientists recognize pasta meals for their place in healthy eating patterns such as the "gold-standard" Mediterranean Diet. Some currently popular fad diets claim that pasta and other carbohydrates do not promote health, which is stirring up media and consumer confusion.

Historians have been unable to pinpoint the moment in Italian history when pasta asciutta as we think of it - the heaping dish of spaghetti or fettucine crowned with sauce and cheese - was born. There is good reason to believe, however, that it all began in Arab Sicily. Noodles known as rishta were eaten in ancient Persia and are mentioned in the cookbooks of medieval Islam. In Italy, the earliest mention of pasta being produced on a commercial scale comes from a survey of Sicily written by an Arabic geographer at the request of the Norman King Roger II. Then as now, for the Greeks and the Romans as well as for our cholesterol-conscious contemporaries, the Mediterranean diet was based on cereals and legumes. While in Greece and in many other parts of the world barley, millet, and other grains predominated, Sicily's soil and climate were particularly suited to the cultivation of hard-grained durum wheat. It was durum wheat, therefore, that supplied the basis of the Sicilian classical diet, either in bread or as whole grains boiled into a sort or porridge or gruel known in the Roman world as puls.

Carbohydrates are one of three macronutrients in the human diet, and have been through millions of years of human evolution. Virtually all national and international guidelines for healthy eating recommend that carbohydrates provide more than 50 percent of daily calories.

Pasta For All

On October 25th, 2007, Oldways marked the tenth anniversary of World Pasta Day by co-organizing, with International Pasta Organisation and Amexigapa, a half-day scientific colloquium entitled "Pasta For All: for Health, for Taste, for Convenience." The event, held in Mexico City, updated the nutrition science on pasta's place in a healthy Mediterranean diet, discussed how to translate this science into consumer messages, and introduce a new consumer brochure PASTA FOR ALL.

To view or download the PASTA FOR ALL brochure, please click here.

Download the Healthy Pasta Meals Scientific Consensus Statement