This New Type Of Pasta Is Good For Your Heart, According To Science

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Hopefully, we all know by now that pasta doesn’t wreck our diets or lead to weight gain — only consuming it in massive quantities beyond any reasonable portion size does. And now, new research from Italy suggests that a particular noodle recipe could actually help promote heart health, making it worth including in your meal prep on a semi-regular basis.

For the study, researchers in Pisa made their pasta dough mixture with standard durum wheat flour and whole-grain barley flour, and proceded to feed the cooked pasta to a group of laboratory mice for five weeks. A second group of mice consumed normal pasta to serve as the control for the experiment. At the conclusion of the five-week diet period, the scientists induced cardiac arrest (AKA heart attacks) in each test subject to see if its distinct diets made any difference to their body’s reactions.

More mice in the group that ate the barley pasta survived the heart attack in general, and the ones that lived had exhibited less damage to their hearts than the mice who at the normal pasta. The researchers believe that this difference is due to the beta-glucan exclusively in the barley pasta, which is a fibrous substance that helps the body grow new blood vessels, naturally bypassing the heart to some degree should a cardiac episode occur.

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“[This is] the first time that the formation of natural bypasses was encouraged via functional food — pasta with barley beta-glucan,” lead researcher Vincenzo Lionetti said in a statement. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show that a sustained dietary intake of pasta enriched with [beta-glucan] safely increases coronary collaterals… and reduces mortality.”

Now, the clearest limitation of the study is that it was performed on mice rather than humans, so we can’t directly extrapolate these results for mankind. And, unfortunately, the barley pasta the researchers made in the lab isn’t available commercially for us to give a try.

So, in the meantime, it’s probably for the best that we maintain an “all things in moderation” type of diet — obviously including pasta every so often, especially varieties that boast a heart-healthy dose of whole grains.