How to Healthify everyday foods: Pasta
Dr. Priyanka Marakini
October 31, 2019
Diet
Love pasta but calorie conscious and scared to make it a part of your diet? Here’s how you can prepare a healthy pasta without losing out on the taste factor.
How to prepare a healthy pasta
A one pot meal:
Add meat, a wide range of vegetables and herbs, lentils, nuts, and some cheese, too. This would make your bowl of pasta a nutrient-rich meal containing carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals. A cheesy pasta will give you the extra goodness of calcium.
Make it fibre rich!
Just pick the hi-fibre variety from your neighborhood supermarket. You can choose from a range of multi-grain and whole-wheat varieties.
Tomatoes, a plenty!
The classic pasta is made with a rich-tomato sauce base, delicately spiced with herbs. So buy fresh tomatoes to make that sauce. And when cooked and reduced, this tomato sauce is a rich source of an antioxidant called lycopene. We’d recommend that you get lots of this antioxidant if you want to look younger for longer, as it has special anti-ageing properties. Add a dash of olive oil to your pasta to aid lycopene absorption.
Gluten Free?
For those of you who want to go the gluten free way, pasta can be your friend. Today, many brands make pasta out of brown rice, soya and corn. They taste just as good, too.
Here’s the calorie count for some of your favourite pastas:
Pesto Pasta – 618 kcal
Pasta aglio e olio – 653 Kcal
Pasta in tomato sauce – 210 Kcal
Pasta and mushrooms in cream sauce – 255 kcal
Chicken Pasta – 293 Kcal
