Healthier Pasta Options - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. With pasta you can eat pasta and make it healthy. The best way to make it healthy would be to choose whole wheat pasta. There are a lot of different whole wheat pastas out there now that actually taste really good, which they did not a few years back, so whole wheats are a really good choice. You do not necessarily need to get the pastas that have a lot of omega-3 or protein in them because even just a whole wheat pasta. As long as you are getting your omega somewhere else in your diet, the whole wheat pasta is the most important thing because that actually reduces the amount of calories because there are three times more fiber in whole wheat pasta than in regular pasta. So in a cup of that you will get 20 less calories than in regular standard pasta, so it is really lower in calories, higher in fiber, of course the whole grain has more antioxidants, vitamins and minerals, phytochemicals, so it is just much better for you. You want to just be careful with the sauce that you use. Tomato sauce is going to be lower in calories. Cream sauces you want to avoid - the heavy cream sauces, they have a lot of calories, a lot of fat. If you are really kind of attached to the creamier sauce, you can make a sauce with light butter, mix it with some lemon juice and some white wine and that will give you more of a white sauce, but it is lighter, it is not as heavy and creamy. If you pick a pasta that is more of an airy shape where it has more air in there, you can cut up to about 60 calories per cup, so that would be like a wagon wheel shape or a large rotini or large shells as opposed to angel hair which would pack down, you know, when you get more pasta in a cup. That is a tricky way to cut the calories. And then making sure you include plenty of vegetables and lean protein with that meal. Really the way people usually eat pasta is the whole plate is filled with pasta, and so that you get a lot of calories, a lot of carbs, and your meal is just out of balance. So if you have a large salad - I would even say eat the salad before your meal - you fill up so you do not eat as much of the pasta, and you feel satisfied with less. And I would always add some sort of protein, lean chicken or ground turkey or a lean ground beef to the sauce so that you have that balance there again so you feel more satisfied, and you are not likely to eat as much. But I would keep the portion to about kind of what they recommend: a little more than a 1/4 of your plate size, and try to make sure that you have protein in there and also lots and lots of vegetables, and the vegetables can be, like I say, on the side in a salad or they can be mixed into the sauce - you can add lots of different veggies into the sauce if you like it that way.
