Bastianich Siblings New Book Reminds Us How Pasta Fits into a Healthy Diet
With so much conflicting nutrition advice in the media, it can become agonizing trying to figure out what foods are and aren’t healthy. Vital, nutritious foods like pasta and other carbohydrates have wrongly gotten a bad reputation in recent years, but there’s a new book that wants to set the record straight.
Healthy Pasta: The Sexy, Skinny and Smart Way to Eat Your Favorite Food written by Joe and Tanya Bastianich, reminds readers that pasta should be a staple in everyone’s kitchen, and shouldn’t be avoided. Healthy Pasta brings pasta back into our diets in a celebratory way. The siblings say the key to fitting pasta into a healthy diet is watching portion sizes. Here are a few of their other tips for cooking healthy pasta dishes:
- Learn to substitute. If you want to skip topping pasta with grated cheese, toast breadcrumbs and crushed almonds in olive oil instead.
- Water is the perfect calorie-free ingredient. Add the starchy cooking water at the end of the cooking process to make sauces thinner.
- Cook pasta al dente. Chewing stimulates your digestive enzymes. Taking longer to eat also means your body has more time to feel full.
- Be picky about your sauces. Heavy butter, cream and cheese sauces are filled with fat. Choose lighter sauces and healthier ingredients like tomatoes, which are sweet and not acidic.
In addition, readers will learn lighter cooking techniques for cooking pasta, the different types of pasta shapes, what’s a reasonable serving size, and more. Healthy Pasta also contains 100 mouth-watering pasta dishes that all clock in at under 500 calories.
Now this is a book we can get behind! We can’t wait to purchase this book, and start making the delicious recipes found in it! If you have questions about the health benefits of pasta, head over to our Nutrition Page.