Pasta proponents fight low-carb craze

By Tom Rachman
The Associated Press

	SANDRO PACE / AP Michael Romano of New York's Union Square Cafe cooks pasta on Monday during the "Pasta Fights Back" conference in Rome.
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ROME  America's battle against pudginess  inspired by the low-carb Atkins, Zone and South Beach diets  has trashed pasta. But defenders of macaroni and its kin rebelled in Rome this week at a conference promoted as "Pasta Fights Back."

Their weapons at the three-day meeting that ended yesterday were science, lectures and delectable plates of pasta handed out free. Another popular dish was denunciation of the latest American diet trend.

"How is it that it can be called a low-carb diet when in fact it is a dangerous high-fat diet? How can that happen in our culture?" railed K. Dun Gifford, president of the Oldways Preservation Trust, the Boston-based food-issues think-tank that organized the event.

One speaker called for a swift death to the Atkins diet. Another skeptically cited 28 eating fads, among them the caveman diet, the sex diet and the Russian air-force diet. A third speaker recalled Sophia Loren's remark: "Everything you see, I owe to pasta."

The conference, officially titled Healthy Pasta Meals, included eminent scientists and was sponsored by Italian government ministries, pasta giant Barilla and the makers of Parmesan cheese, among others.

The executive chef of New York's Union Square Cafe, Michael Romano, flew in to cook.

"People want to eat from the time they get up till the time they go to sleep. And by the way, no exercise, please," Romano said. "It's all about proportion, it's all about balance."

Oldways argues that eating must be balanced  not overloaded with fat and protein, nor heavy with carbohydrates.

Pasta, Oldways says, is an ideal delivery system for healthy ingredients: The carbs in high-quality pasta made from durum wheat are converted slowly into glucose, which has the benefit of more stable insulin levels and keeps the eater feeling full longer.

John Foreyt, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, noted that Italians have enjoyed the health benefits of pasta for more than 1,000 years.

"Pasta has been wrongly injected into the good carb/bad carb debate, and we want to dispel the notion that it should be avoided," he said in the conference's closing statement.
 

Many dieters have enjoyed considerable weight loss through regimens that are heavy in meat, cheese and eggs and ultralight in carbs. Millions of Americans are on some form of these diets.

At the Rome conference, cookbook writer Susan Herrmann Loomis expressed sadness about the U.S. attitude toward eating.

"Americans come with this enormous fear of what is on their plates, and it translates into fad diets," she said. "Unfortunately, that rarely has to do with just enjoying the heck out of what you're doing."