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19.06.2017

Want to lose weight or become healthier? Cook your potatoes and pasta a day ahead

Athletes, health fanatics and dieters often have a love-hate relationship with carbohydrates. Carbs are a source of energy, but at the same time glucose does all sorts of things to your body that you'd rather avoid. Like inhibiting the breakdown of fat in the body. Or speeding up aging processes. Researchers have discovered that you can reduce the detrimental effects of carbohydrates by cooking rice, pasta and other sources of carbs and cooling them down for a day or half a day.

Study
In 2014, for a TV programme, Denise Robertson and Chris van Tulleken of the University of Surrey, in a country almost outside Europe, got students to eat a meal containing pasta on three different occasions [bbc.com 16 October 2014]

On one occasion the pasta was served immediately after cooking; on another occasion the researchers let the pasta cool down and served it a day later; and on yet another occasion the students were given pasta that was cooled down after it had been cooked and then warmed up again.

The researchers discovered that cooling down the pasta resulted in a considerable reduction in the uptake of glucose. The most noticeable difference was when the pasta was cooled down and then heated up again. The researchers measured half the amount of glucose in the blood of the students after they had eaten warmed up pasta compared with after they'd eaten freshly cooked pasta.

Another study
What you can do with pasta you can also do with rice, as Sudhair James of the College of Chemical Sciences of Sri Lanka recounted in 2015 during a congress of the American Chemical Society. [washingtonpost.com March 25, 2015] James found half the amount of glucose in the blood of participants who had eaten a portion of rice that had been in the fridge for 12 hours after it had been cooked than in the blood of participants who had eaten freshly cooked rice.

Explanation
The carbohydrates in rice, potatoes, wheat pasta and bread consist of twenty percent amylopectin and eighty percent amylose. Glucose from amylopectin is absorbed faster than glucose from amylose.

After cooking, the hydrogen atoms of the glucose molecules in amylopectin and amylose connect to form bridges. The body finds it more difficult to cut these chains into separate glucose units.

Resistant starch
Some of the starch is converted as a result into resistant starch. The body cannot absorb resistant starch, but micro-organisms in the gut can convert it partially into short chain fatty acids.

By cooling down and warming up carbs not only does your body absorb less glucose from these foods, but the uptake is also slower. At the same time you also stimulate your gut flora. In addition, resistant starch also has a positive effect on body composition, probably via the short chain fatty acids. The links below give you more information.

Source:
Food and Nutrition Sciences Vol.5 No.3 (2014) 280-91.

More:
How to make a resistant starch super-pancake that builds muscles and burns fat 08.01.2016
More energy and more fat burning with resistant starch 08.06.2012
On a diet? Toasted bread from the freezer is better 29.09.2008

Archives:
Slow Carb & Low Glyc

More energy and more fat burning with indigestible starch Maize starch that has been made indigestible through a chemical process has two effects that you wouldn't expect to find in one nutrient.	Low GI breakfast gives endurance athletes faster times Your mother probably always told you to eat whole wheat bread in the mornings, but since you've been cycling or running seriously you've changed to pasta and white rice: packed with carbs, but hardly any dietary fibre.	Eating whole grain products instead of refined ones saves you a hundred kilocalories a day You'll find it easier to maintain your weight and lose weight if you eat whole grain products rather than their refined counterparts. So eat whole grain bread and pasta instead of white bread and pasta, and brown rice instead of white rice.