Pasta (White, Boiled)

Food · Grain · Food, Typed Supps

Cooked and cooled, some of its starch stops behaving like starch.

Stage by stage

Gelatinisation (Cooking, then stomach): Boiling hydrates and swells the starch granules, opening them to enzyme attack.
Digestion (Small intestine): Amylase hydrolyses accessible starch to glucose, which is absorbed conventionally.
Retrogradation (On cooling): Amylose re-crystallises into resistant starch that digestive enzymes can no longer open.
Fermentation (Large intestine): That resistant fraction is fermented by gut bacteria into short-chain fatty acids.

Timing

Eaten with protein, fat or vegetables the glycaemic response flattens further. Al dente beats soft.

Time to effect

30–60 min: Postprandial glucose peaks.
On cooling: Resistant starch forms, and survives reheating.

Allergens

Contains: Gluten. May contain: Eggs. Derived from what this food is, not from a product label.

Eating patterns

Fits: Vegan, Vegetarian, Pescatarian, Halal, Kosher. Depends on the product: Low-FODMAP.

Satiety

119 on the satiety index, where white bread is 100 — moderate. Measured by Holt et al. (1995).

Environmental footprint

1.6 kg CO2e and 648 litres of freshwater per kg, matched to "Wheat & rye" in Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science 360.

Cost band

Cheap — roughly £2 per kg, as a band midpoint rather than a price.

Key nutrients

Carbohydrate
Selenium
Manganese

Nutrition per 100g

Calories: 137
Protein: 5.3g
Carbohydrate: 26.2g
of which sugars: 0.2g
Fat: 0.4g
of which saturated: 0.1g
Fibre: 2.2g
Sodium: 2mg

Food vs. supplement

Pasta reaches a lower glycaemic index than bread made from identical flour, purely through physical structure — a reminder that how a food is built matters as much as what it is milled from.

Kitchen tip

Al dente, then cooled for a salad, gives you both the lower glycaemic response and the extra resistant starch.

Common myth

“Cook pasta, cool it, and the carbs disappear.” In reality: Cooling converts a modest share of digestible starch into resistant starch — a real, measurable effect that slightly lowers the glucose response and feeds gut bacteria. It does not remove the calories, and the size of the change is a few percentage points of the starch, not a transformation.