Pasta

Just wanted to throw in GI for consideration. The GI database seems to be down at the moment (weird) but I'd assume that whole grain pasta has a 10-15 point lower GI than white.

I have swapped my pastas, potatoes to different veggies that have a similar texture (spaghetti squash, eggplant, and other squashy veggies for pasta, sweet potato strips baked with some sea salt for fries, mashed cauliflower instead of potatoes. When I do rice, I still do white rice. I cant stand the brown rice, and only have it like one or two times a month.

Grains are unhealthy? News to me. Maybe if you have a wheat allergy or some such, but for the average person, on moderation, grains are good for you. They have numerous B vitamins and minerals.

My mother was Italian; so pasta was a staple in our house. However, in Italy, pasta is generally served as a first course or a side dish. In America we eat a dinner size plate helping. That's where we go wrong. It's like everything else. In moderation nothing is bad for you.

Grains are junk, it's not something that anyone that is human can actually process properly. Those vitamins that they have stored in them are effectively negated by the other properties present in grains (see above previous post). Some people have adverse reactions to it and others do not, but there is still some measure of damage being done to the digestive tract and organs. The only animals that can actually properly digest grains are certain types of birds. We've all been duped for years by our grain subsidizing government and grain pushing companies that they are good for us, but the higher rates of human disease in which eliminating grains stops the problem are not something that can be ignored forever. I've also never heard of anyone, even in government and nutritionist circles refer to grains as a superior food source, only that you can feed a lot of people cheaply. They probably won't kill you unless you are celiac, but they certainly aren't the best nutritionally dense source of food available. I don't see companies or the government pushing vegtables the same way they love to push their grains...food for thought IMO.

I also come from an Italian family, great grandfather was straight off the boat in 1890. In Italy they don't eat the same as we do here, the pasta is in much less quantity, or at least not daily, and my grandfather says that typically you wouldn't serve bread with a pasta meal as we love to do here. Italian cooking is SO much more than pasta, it's the bastardized, Americanized version of Italian cooking with all the junk pasta that's a real problem. It's just like any other ethnic food that is popular, it's so far removed from its roots that it's not event he same thing any more. I worked in a Chinese restaurant in high school and ate with the cooks on occasion. Their food was much more vegtable and meat based (though with rice of course, the least junky grain of them all) and tasted WAY better than anything the restaurant served. When I asked about it they told me "Only Americans eat that *kitten*, in China/Hong Kong nobody eats like this, or only for special occasions do we have so much fried stuff and sugar!"