Pass the pasta – it’s time to end this faddy food farce

Inearly choked on my kale salad when I saw it. For hark! The already deeply farcical relationship between nutritional research and our awful eating habits has entered a new realm of ridiculousness. Hold on to your seat belts, folks: a new study published in the journal BMJ Open has found that after years of carb-bashing, it’s actually OK to eat pasta.

As with virtually every other “finding” related to obesity and health, this study concludes not that pasta is itself a miracle food (though it does say that it’s not a bad nutritional bet), but that those who eat it in moderation as part of a “healthy, balanced diet” tend to stay slim or even lose weight.

No doubt those who eat doughnuts and Haribo in moderation as part of a healthy balanced diet are also slim. I’m waiting for a new study to back me up on this. We’ve already had “research” suggest that dark chocolate is good for the heart, so why stop there?

After I chortled, and promptly made myself a huge bowl of pasta, I became deeply annoyed. For these doctors are being duplicitous. By going on about how particular foods are or are not dietary demons, they merely encourage us to fetishise them. What they’re actually saying again and again is that people who eat less – read: think about food less in general – do OK.

It’s those of us who are continually fixated on diets, forbidden and allowed foods, that get fat. You can binge on the nuts/fruit/salad/smoothies in your latest fad diet and still gain weight.

If medical researchers were really keen to get us to slim, they might lead by example and, well, think about something other than food for a while.