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Pasta Is Good For You, Say Scientists Funded By Big Pasta (buzzfeed.com)
Earlier this month, numerous news outlets reported on a study which concludes that eating pasta is good for health. In fact, the reports claimed, eating pasta could help you lose weight. Except, there is more to the story. BuzzFeed News reports: What those and many other stories failed to note, however, was that three of the scientists behind the study in question had financial conflicts as tangled as a bowl of spaghetti, including ties to the world's largest pasta company, the Barilla Group. Over the last decade or so, with the rise of the Atkins, South Beach, paleo, and ketogenic diets, Big Pasta has battled a societal shift against carbohydrates -- and funded and promoted research suggesting that noodles are good for you.
At least 10 peer-reviewed studies about pasta published since 2008 were either funded directly by Barilla or, like the one published this month, were carried out by scientists who have had financial ties to the company, which reported sales of 3.4 billion euros ($4.2 billion) in 2016. For two years, Barilla has publicized some of these studies, plus others favorable to its product, on its website with taglines like "Eat Smart Be Smart...With Pasta" and "More Evidence Pasta Is Good For You." And the company hired the large public relations firm Edelman to push the latest study's findings to journalists.
At least 10 peer-reviewed studies about pasta published since 2008 were either funded directly by Barilla or, like the one published this month, were carried out by scientists who have had financial ties to the company, which reported sales of 3.4 billion euros ($4.2 billion) in 2016. For two years, Barilla has publicized some of these studies, plus others favorable to its product, on its website with taglines like "Eat Smart Be Smart...With Pasta" and "More Evidence Pasta Is Good For You." And the company hired the large public relations firm Edelman to push the latest study's findings to journalists.
Any italians here able to comment on how pasta empowers their conversational gesticulars?
In the heading, you should enquote "Scientists" to indicate the irony. A Scientist is not a Shill. A Shill is not a Scientist.
... I can get it pasta my mouf.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The blessings of the Flying Spaghetti Monster are numerous and provided with great love....and usually a nice sauce.
In an ideal world the Scientists are blacklisted, the research Groups are blacklisted, and the world moves on to "Real Science."
Oh, that's right, we don't have much real science going on, it's almost all corporate driven marketing or self-beneficial now.
... try anti-pasta.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Just eat some pasta, or don't eat some pasta. Unless you're eating pasta three times a day, and nothing else, who the fuck cares. Have some pasta. Have some fruit. Have some vegetables. Have some meat. Don't eat garbage, and don't eat one and only one thing.
"Old man yells at systemd"
The only ones who are going to spend big money on researching pasta have some kind of interest in pasta. I'm unaware of any large anti-pasta interest groups so naturally the only remaining group who would fund pasta research are pasta producers. Not like big oil is going to run around researching pasta, and the government is too busy trying to determine how many different genders can be applied to the genus Melocactus.
Move more, eat less. No, you are not genetically fat, you just have no willpower and are lazy.
I drink only Soylent, and it has everything anyone needs.
Except for the once-a-week I go out to a restaurant, but that is just to keep my wife minimally satisfied.
... by Stephan Pasta.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Since these fad diets are not based on science - and the people who adopt either don't know or don't care - maybe pasta companies could emphasize...oh, never mind, reason will always be a distant second, at best.
Rice is nice, but pasta's faster.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Ishmael: "You really should try to quit, Mr. Munson. They say it's bad for your heart, your lungs. It quickens the aging process."
Roy: "Is that right. Who's done more research on the subject than the good people at the American Tobacco Industry? They say it's harmless. Why would they lie? If you're dead, you can't smoke."
Science has been in the pockets of governments and lobbyists for decades now.
It's a very low fat source of protein and energy. Extremely low fat in proportion to the others. I eat a pound of pasta every day as part of my 4,000 calorie per day diet (pasta contains approximately 1,600 calories in a pound). I don't know how I'd make my calorie intake goals without it.
"good for you" is too broad a statement and can't be scientifically validated. Pasta tends to have a lower glycemic index (GI) than most bread and potatoes and some varieties of rice as they're typically eaten, meaning that it keeps your blood-glucose levels more even and puts less load on your pancreas (which produces insulin). But then pasta tends to be calorie dense and so easy to overeat, leading to weight-gain and perhaps obesity and all its accompanying health effects. Also, what do people typically have with their pasta? Fatty, calorie-dense, and/or high-GI sauces, toppings, and/or condiments?
Yes, pasta can be part of a healthy meal but it can also be part of a very unhealthy meal. We should be talking about healthy meals, not individual ingredients.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Reminiscent of the days when the Oleo Margarine Industry published studies telling Americans how bad butter was for their health. Eggs, milk and butter had been consumed for countless years but suddenly they were a deadly health risk, just ask the people selling the alternative product.
On the one hand, we should be skeptical of "research" funded by folks with a stake in the outcome. On the other, who else would do it? Would a study funded by an Atkins advocacy group that didn't find benefits to a low-carb diet ever see the light of day? No, it would quietly be shredded, burned, and buried. Like our adversarial court system, you need people who think that we've gotten it wrong to pony up to get the other viewpoint looked at. The real test is, are the results reproducible?
Who cares?
If the science is accurate, who cares if "Big Pasta" funded it?
If the science isn't accurate, then that's the problem, not who funded it.
Look, the cold hard facts are that you're better off eating lower on the food chain, and especially avoiding processed foods. Mostly because they remove nutrients and add salts and other things that you should add to taste after it's been processed. The only diet that actually works even given human behavior is the MIND diet, which is the Mediterranean Influenced diet that promotes longevity and brain function.
Stop eating the top end carnivorous fish in sushi and eat lower in the food chain, and stop frying things in fats and you'll be good.
All studies end up showing this. It's one of our secrets in research.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
> when did Big Pasta Corp become a thing?
Probably when they finally figured out in the 80's that they didn't know what the fuck they were doing W.R.T. marketing pasta sauce.
Episode is: Perfect Pasta Sauce (The Jimquisition REMASTERED)
Many diets are not based on science, but ketogenic diet (and Atkins as the base before it) are actually based on real science.
If you are interested then Carl Franklin and Richard Morris does an excellent job discussing it (and linking to actual research) in their podcast "2 Keto Dudes".
Highly recommend it if you (or anybody else) are interested in learning about the topic.
Btw. start at show number 1 og go from there. Most of the details are explained in great detail in the first few shows.
Nearly all of the "climate scientists" draw their salaries from government institutions.
Except that their salaries do not depend on getting certain results. The salaries of Big Pasta do.
Yeah, right. Suppose for a second, they conclude, there is no danger of climate change — for how much longer after arriving at that conclusion will they continue getting those salaries?
Conflict of interest is conflict of interest...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This also applies to pasta, obviously.
Cool story, bro.
Stay classy!
for how much longer after arriving at that conclusion will they continue getting those salaries?
Most of climate research is overlapping with other research that we want to continue, such as historic climate reconstruction, weather modelling, and earth observation.
And if you are right, why is the current Trump administration not telling these scientists to produce the results they want ?
You can question the consensus all you want. Jut bring some actual scientific questions.
Also, in other news "The world is getting warmer, Say Scientists Funded By Global Warming Alarmist"
statement. Authors are supposed to disclose any funding or institutional relationships that might bias their findings.
There's nothing wrong with Barilla funding nutrition studies, but there's a lot wrong with news organizations obtaining their understanding of nutrition from Barilla PR efforts promoting Barilla-funded research. PR efforts *always* misrepresent how conclusive studies are.
In a subject as complex as nutrition on a question as vague as "healthy" you will always, always find conflicting evidence. Nearly every snake oil remedy sold by the supplement industry is represented as having scientific support... because it has. The supplement hucksters just leave out all the ambiguous and contradictory evidence.
"Evidence-based" means supported by the totality of evidence. Industry-funded research has its place, but it's nothing anyone but a researcher in the field should be paying attention to. In fact it's a bad idea to take any media reports of scientific papers at face value, since very few media outlets have a dedicated science desk anymore, much less reporters who are keeping up with specific fields.
The gold standard for the layman ought to be systematic reviews published in high impact factor journals. After that, technical reports by scientific commissions and panels tasked with reviewing evidence. General media reports of individual studies are worthless, and worse than worthless when they "news" source is allowing itself to be used as the mouthpiece of a PR firm.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
All of it only deemed necessary because of the fears of the Global Warming, err, Climate Change. Should these fears subside, the funding will go back to, say, the levels of the 1993, the bubble will deflate and 75% of the people involved in climate science today will have to look for new jobs...
Because conflict of interest is more subtle than that... Trump is not relevant here — as I say, if they conclude, climate-fears are overblown, they'll lose their jobs Trump or not...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Just what the pasta-makers would tell you about the research in TFA.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Even the pasta makers won't claim there's a scientific consensus on pasta.
I'd rather support my local pasta farmers.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Big pasta" is a thing?
You mean like giant shells, or extra-large rigatoni or Guinness-record mile-long lasagna?
According to Bloomberg, Italians are the world's healthiest people: https://www.weforum.org/agenda...
And according to the OECD, Italians are the slimmest people in west, and the third-slimmest among the developed countries: https://www.oecd.org/els/healt...
And I sincerely doubt that either of the two is on Barilla's payroll.
I am trained in gorilla warfare
That should come in handy.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
...with a nation that produces not only delicious pasta and wise scientists, but the MAFIA?
Forget about it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Every week, there's some study going on to tell you if a food we all consume regularly is "good" or "bad" for you. In many of these cases, you can go back in time a bit and find a study on the same food that concludes the opposite. (Coffee is good for you! No, wait... coffee is bad for you because of increased risks of X and Y. No, it's good for you because those risks are small while this new benefit we think it has is a big deal!)
I remember, growing up, how my mom (a registered nurse) would be SO concerned we were eating healthy. So we avoided fats like real butter and bacon, and always chose options with vegetable oils instead of lard.
Now? The general advice says that was ALL wrong. Margarine is unhealthy and a lot of those partially hydrogenated oils were far worse for you than old-fashioned lard. Some doctors are even recommending diets higher in fats (like bacon), even to heart patients who recently had bypass surgery.
So as likely as not, I'll have more problems with clogged arteries when I'm older from my mom's good intentions than if I just ignored it all. Great....
The simple advice to eat any one thing in moderation and to eat a varied diet is probably all that's needed for "good health".
The Pasta Nostra?
Happy people make bad consumers.
Everybody must EAT and the industry dominates rural areas with their disproportionate political power to the city factories.
They make it illegal to simply report about meat production or you are a terrorist, hell they got stuff into the Patriot Act!
There are always some intellectual whores who will sell their minds but the real thing to watch is the INSTITUTIONS who house these corrupt scientists. A think tank pimping out scientists is something to watch but a university or government research lab is where the pitchforks and ropes need to be brought out. The media needs to be taken to task for being lazy and constantly leaping at every PhD who is being pimped to them by shady groups and they NEED to instead be begging professors to take time out from grading to give an opinion (hell, pay them for their time which was more common in the past. A paid consultant is far better than a free professional whore for whatever industry PR firm pays their "think" tank tax write off... these things boomed in the 70s and legit academics hardly are seen on TV anymore.) think about it
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The study was undoubtedly done by Italians.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
..I'd get very sick, and very fat (again; not fat anymore, not by a longshot). Normal wheat makes me ill, saps my energy, and makes me fat. So does an inordinate amount of carbohydrates in my diet, especially the highly-processed type like in most pasta.
(No, I'm not a 'keto' person, either. I just have a clue or three about what I should and should not be eating after all these years.)
Could we please have some sort of legislation making 'biased' 'studies' like these illegal? Give them a sound beating or something? The food industry has been allowed to be so self-serving like this, and it's got to be part of the obesity problem.
The human brain is not a completely fool.
We eat pasta because pasta is good for you, over almost all environments, over all of human history. It's only recently that humanity has stumbled into a 24/7 horn-of-plenty cheesecake buffet that flummoxes our dietary instincts. Note that this is only a marginal effect: pasta is good for you, until it isn't.
Most of chubby America these days lives on the far side of the marginal fence on the consumption of all three macronutrient groups.
In this marginal world, just about any calorie you push off your plate is good for you. Refined fructose and badly processed oils are surely the most effective calories to push off your plate. Foods rich in water-soluble vegetable fibers are probably the last calories you want to push off your plate.
Almost everything in between can be justified one way or the other within an overall pattern of judgement and moderation.
I suspect that eliminating refined sugar, bad oils (e.g. trans fats), industrial preserves (all those cookies and cakes and biscuits and chips in the middle of the grocery store), and substantially boosting nutrient- and fibre-rich vegetables (lettuce, broccoli, spinach, squash) would account for half of the total health improvement from dietary change presently available to most of the healthy-ish chubsters in American right now (regardless of caloric restriction).
This is why every fad diet studied always produces a net positive effect (because every fad diet does at least one of the things above, and usually any effort to stay on a programmatic diet makes people more aware of their snacking on the margins, so you usually get a mild caloric restriction along for the ride, even if the diet itself doesn't stipulate this).
That brings you to the knee of the curve, and then the narcissism porn sets in: how will I look in my bikini during spring break, how will I shave 0.5% off my personal-best marathon time in the next Boston marathon?
And now we're into a self-imposed regime of fascist adherence for marginal gains prominent in the second or third decimal point.
I'm not knocking elite levels of personal fitness, but there is a substantial opportunity cost involved.
The same guy busy posting about where he buys his organic carrots online for his organic smoothie is probably the same guy who didn't get around to updating his anti-ransomware antivirus filter (oh how that Vitamix whiles away the hours). He's probably the same guy who could have helped his teenage son get a decent grade in his grade seven math class, but was too busy running another preparatory 10 k.
Dietary tweaks don't make any mortal soul so godlike that this kind of peripheral neglect can be easily forgiven (immortality in this context is bequeathed by magazine-cover glossy shots).
All I've done here is explained the 80-20 law.
The problem here is that diet lives next door to the sexual-selection fitness function (on the exotic, aspirational tail), and boy oh boy is our general acceptance of 80-20 governing dynamics rapidly concealed in a basement closet if it casts the least doubt on our sexual preening reflex.
The topic is neither the pasta, nor even the consensus. The topic is conflict of interest. If you are hired by someone interested in a certain conclusion, your confirming of the conclusion is tainted.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Pasta please, and pass the salt!
Nope, not if the science is valid.
Iceland contains some of the world's healthiest people and the population also drinks ungodly amounts of soft drinks as I understand it. That doesn't indicate to me that pepsi is good for you. Italy's health numbers have been going down a bit lately but their health stats are due to a mediterranean diet that can include some portion of pasta.
Italians are always complaining about how Americans over-cook pasta -- and they are right !
As a child in the US, the only complaint my family ever made about pasta was "Its not cooked enough".
Now my parents both have type2 diabetes and I am educating them about pasta and the glycemic index.
Al-Dente pasta digests more slowly, enters the bloodsteam more slowly, and has a lower glycemic index.
Soft pasta has a terrible glycemic index, too many carbs enter the blood faster than your body can use them, so your body converts them to fat.
Actually, it is a bit more complicated, but that is basically correct.
Their programs are all spaghetti code
Table-ized A.I.
"Big Pasta" made me instantly imagine Jabba the Hutt but made out of pasta :-)
I know that carbohydrates are, in general, bad for your health; the correlation of high carb consumption with obesity is quite high. Dietary fats and protein are much better for you. Meat, cheese, dairy.....
But pasta is _ALMOST_ worth it. That, and pizza. The foods of the gods themselves.
First off, I ran many, many studies in my career. I paid for them, they always said exactly what I wanted them to, and the folks at various consulting firms and universities knew that's how it'd roll if they wanted to keep getting paid on a regular basis.
Always find out who paid for a study, and that'll tell you why the study says what it says. I'm pretty sure nobody ever woke up one morning free or even remotely free of bias and just decided to spend a few months of their time just to see what they came up with.
Next, can we dismiss the idea that our body works like a furnace, or that a calorie is a calorie? Our bodies react differently to different foods. It pays to look at how foods affect blood sugar. If you eat 500 calories of steak, your blood sugar isn't going to budge much. Eat 500 calories of carbohydrates...and it almost doesn't matter how "whole grain" or "unprocessed" they are, at least when it comes to the american diet...and your blood sugar goes up. You feel energized, you'll get an insulin release and that tells your body to store that extra blood sugar as fat. Over time you can become insulin resistant and develop diabetes. After the insulin release, you "crash" and your brain screams "More glucose please!!!"
Studying metabolic syndrome a bit and you'll see that some of the fundamental aspects of how we view food and diets is simply wrong.
Lastly, saying that eating three 1/2 cup portions of pasta will positively or negatively effect your health or weight is a big steaming pile of crap. Nobody in the US eats a half cup of pasta. Three and a half cups of anything over a week will have almost zero effect on your health. Well, perhaps not a cup and a half of mercury or hot molten lava.