hey there it's Steve from serious keto and over the last couple of years I have done a handful of videos on resistant starch and its effect on my blood glucose I've tested potatoes I've tested rice I've tested uh tapioca starch green banana flour a couple of different types of bread but the one thing I haven't tested yet is pasta and that has been the most common request that I've received now a handful of years ago there was a show on the BBC called trust me I'm a doctor and in one of the episodes Dr Denise Robertson of the University of Surrey looked at the impact of creating a resistant starch out of pasta by cooking it then cooling it then reheating it and in that episode she made claims about the impact of resistant starch on blood glucose she said it would reduce the glucose Spike by 50 percent she also talked about the benefits to your gut microbiome from a resistant starch now that I can't test but I will be testing the blood glucose as well as any other physical things I might feel feel from eating this pasta I've attempted to replicate what happened in that video as closely as possible which means for each of my servings of pasta I had 100 grams now in this video they did blood glucose testing so they were testing at I think 15 minute intervals by doing finger sticks and drawing blood I have a Dexcom G6 continuous glucose monitor on which will communicate to my phone via Bluetooth and it will capture my glucose continuously over the entire testing period I will then analyze the results using the levels health program which I will link to down in the description below in case you're curious additionally I will link to that BBC special an article and then within that article is a link to the video I'll put that down there as well in case you'd like to watch that either before or after this video a couple of quick disclaimers to get out of the way first I am not a diabetic either type 1 or type 2. so my results and your results May Vary if you do have diabetes I'm not a doctor or a scientist so don't look at this as a scientific experiment this is one guy so sample size of one it's a single data point and it's my data so take it for what it is that said I still tried to control a number of variables so in each of these tests I was fasted I waited long enough in the day that I was past any sort of dawn effect where your glucose rises in the morning which means each day I was testing between noon and 1 pm I put a two day break between each of the tests just to make sure that I was sort of renormalizing my blood glucose and ketones as much as possible and finally I did no physical activity either prior to or during the glucose testing window I recorded all of these tests two or three weeks ago because I wanted to see what would happen after my body normalized if there was any sort of side effects or anything that I was witnessing did being away from pasta for a certain period of time make these things go away so after we get through the testing I'll give you that info information any other data I have and a summary of my thoughts for my pasta I'm just using some spiral pasta from my local grocery store and I'm going to make probably five or six servings worth just in case I have to do a bunch of testing I will cook this to Al Dente then strain it rinse off any extra starch from the pasta water and then measure out 100 grams there we go for my sauce I'm using rayo's arabiata that is six grams total carbohydrates per half cup 5 grams net I'm going to use about a quarter of that so instead of 125 grams I wouldn't be shooting for 30 to 35 grams so these sauce should have minimal impact and the sauce was heated Stir It In and away we go okay I'm going to kick off the glucose monitoring using the levels Health software and here we go this is just our plain cooked once Sauced up pasta I kind of thought I didn't miss pasta but uh wow I guess I kind of do this is this could be a slippery slope but I'm gonna finish this and then we're gonna see how my glucose responds for my Baseline pasta only cooked not resistant see you soon it's been two days since I did the initial pasta test normally I come back within two or three hours to give you my blood glucose results but it took so long for my glucose to return back to its original value that I had to basically disassemble my lighting equipment and camera equipment so that I could make dinner let me show you the data the levels Health app for any particular food item that you're scoring scores only for two hours I've put in a request with them to see if you can lengthen that period of time purely based on this so if you look just at the two hours this doesn't look bad for eating pasta just a 19 Point glucose rise however if I look at the data a little bit further throughout the day you can see that my glucose went up to 118 and the only thing I'd eaten had been that pasta so that's a 28 point rise in glucose frankly that's not nearly as big as I was expecting though I will say after having eaten 100 grams of pasta that's probably about one quarter of the amount that I would normally have or I think most people would probably have if they're eating a big plate of pasta I ate that bowl of pasta at 12 50 pm and as we look at the data you can see it was not until 503 PM that my glucose returned back to my starting point which was a 90. so while this wasn't an incredibly steep spike it was a very sustained increase in blood glucose so now what I have here is some chilled pasta again I waited out 100 grams and 35 grams of sauce I have never in my life eaten cold pasta with tomato sauce on it I love cold pizza but I've never done this before it just feels somewhat wrong to me and it doesn't taste nearly as awesome as it did when it was cooked but I'm gonna finish this and then we'll see how my glucose responds I may be back in two hours three hours maybe not for a couple of days I am back with the glucose results for the chilled and eaten cold pasta and this is interesting and not especially in a good way you can see that my blood glucose spiked at least in the first two hours on the levels Health app higher than it did with the initial test so I had a spike of 38 points I ate this cold pasta at 12 23 pm and my starting glucose was 97. and you can see right here it took until 4 52 PM so four and a half hours for my glucose to get back down to where it was when I started so cooling the pasta clearly is not where the magic happens in this assuming there is any magic that happens in this but if you watch the video that I did on sourdough bread we saw a similar thing there as well that the frozen bread then consumed was worse than just the initial bread so I'm going to come back in a day or two and do another test possibly the final test depending on the results this time taking the chilled pasta and reheating it and see if it winds up mimicking the study that was done on the BBC so here I have the pasta that was refrigerated and then reheated in total this was in the fridge for I believe four days three days four days something like that and then I reheated it I made sure that I had 100 grams of pasta once again and 35 grams of sauce now before I start eating this an interesting thing I noticed but kind of disregarded after the first bowl of pasta then I saw it again after the second bowl of pasta and if I see it again after this then I'll know it's definitely a thing but since going keto I have not had much in the way of gas I mean rarely rarely do I have gas for both of the last two bowls of pasta the night of of that test and kind of throughout the the wee hours of the next morning I was incredibly gassy I mean I know TMI but man I have not farted that much in the last three years and then the day that I took off after each of these tests no gas so we'll see what happens with this bowl I'm sure this is going to be way better than the cold stuff all right I'm gonna finish this bowl and then we're going to see over the next handful of hours how my body reacts and I'll be back with that data all right let's take a look at the results this continues to kind of blow my mind this resistant starch thing because I'm I'm having a hard time overcoming my skepticism even though I keep seeing data that seems to show that this stuff works so you can see right here only a 16 point movement in glucose response and it came back pretty quick it was not this extended four four and a half hour thing that we saw with the other two tests so we started at a 94 and went up to a 115. so if my math is correct that's a 20 point rise still 20 versus 28 that is uh kind of in line with what that BBC special had if you watch the video for that they said they saw a 50 reduction in glucose response so this was fairly close to that now you will notice that it looks like there's sort of an uptick that's happening right about that two hour mark so I continued to test and you can see there was a brief little uptick I have no idea what caused that but then it stabilized so I I'm still sort of at a loss over all of this what I'm going to do is come back in another day or two I'm going to see as I look at the past five or six days the impact on my blood ketones and on my weight and of course tonight we'll also see if anything happens you know with the whole gas thing and from there I'll decide is it worth doing another test so I've witnessed some interesting things in terms of the data and just bodily reactions after eating that reheated pasta first off the other two pastas both caused me to gain weight and it knocked my ketones down the third pasta the reheated pasta actually I lost weight from day to day after eating that and my ketones went up now I'm not ready to make any sort of a proclamation on this quite yet because I want to do one more test I probably ought to do about a dozen more tests but I'm only willing to do one more test and that is I'm gonna eat some more cold pasta once again I add 100 grams of pasta now this pasta has been in the fridge now for five or six days I then added some oil and a little Italian seasoning there are no carbs in the Italian seasoning no sugar anything like that I figured by eating this this is going to answer potentially a couple of other questions for me for example is it that the longer you refrigerate a pasta the more resistant it becomes and that's why we saw the results in test number three that we did does fat blunt a glucose response on cold pasta so could we eat pasta salad potentially also when I ate that reheated pasta I didn't have gas like I did with the first two so that will be another thing that we potentially find out after eating this bowl of pasta so here we go with the world's lamest pasta salad don't ever make this as a recipe this would have been significantly better with mayo or ranch dressing or something like that but I didn't want to add additional variables so I'm going to power through this bowl and I'll be back with the glucose results all right let's see how they're refrigerated and then oiled up pasta performed not that great a 36 point glucose Spike and you can see here that it took about three and a half hours for my glucose to get back to the starting point so it would appear that with pasta as it was with bread simply refrigerating or freezing in the case of the bread is not the thing that reduces the glucose response so tomorrow I will see what my weight in ketones are like I will summarize the data come back to you with the data my thoughts and interpretation so I'm going to start by talking about the impact that this had on my weight and my ketones on the morning that I started this test so prior to eating any pasta my weight was 165.5 pounds and my ketones were at a 0.7 which is usually pretty typical for me the day after eating the Baseline pasta my weight was up 1.1 pounds and my ketones were down by 0.2 I took a day off my weight went back down 0.8 pounds and ketones went up by 0.1 back to 8.6 the day after eating the heated and then chilled pasta my weight went up 1.7 pounds and my ketones dropped down to 0.2 I lost four tenths of a pound on my day off and my ketones recovered Again by 0.1 back up to 8.3 and this is where things get interesting because I had the prepared then cooled then reheated pasta the day after eating that my weight went down 1.4 pounds and my ketones went back up to a 0.5 on my day off I went down an additional 1.2 pounds and ketones got back to a 0.6 finally after eating the cold pasta with just the oil on it my weight went back up 0.9 pounds but interestingly my ketones went up to a 1.2 now I don't know if that was because the additional oil that I consumed in the book end your carb Confusion by Dr Eric Westman he says that ketones are less a factor of the amount of fat that you consume and more about reducing the carbohydrates so that data point is a little bit confusing to me beyond the data I want to talk about the physiological effects that this had on me the only time that I had this pasta that I didn't experience just this out of control gas was the third test the actual resistant starch test where it was heated and then cooled and then reheated that was the only day that didn't happen so interesting one thing I did notice across the entire week-long period was an increase in mucus my sinuses were more congested when I'd wake up in the morning and I'd shower I had to clear my throat and to get some of that gunk out and I was experiencing some inflammation now normally when I get inflammation like from bread and some of these keto breads that I've tried that have soybean oil and canola oil I didn't feel it in my Knuckles and knees so much as I did kind of through my lower back and after a couple of days of being off of this pasta testing routine I was back to normal so I'm fairly convinced that it was an inflammatory reaction to the wheat of some sort so if I were to kind of put a package around all this information or data that I've sort of puked out at you so far it would be that yes this method of preparing a starch does seem to reduce the glucose response it doesn't make it a great glucose response it doesn't eliminate a glucose response but for some people that minimization may be enough I think for those of us on keto no probably not and in fact I spent three years really kind of getting used to not having pasta and getting very happy with some of the keto pasta Alternatives out there and I'll link to one of those in the end card as well additionally I was very surprised that at the end of the week my weight was within one tenth of a pound of my starting weight I did not expect that at all but here's the thing I don't continue to do keto because of the weight loss benefits or because it controls my blood glucose per se or keeps me you know keeps my Ketone reading at a certain amount I do it because the way that it makes me feel and I don't enjoy inflammation at all I didn't enjoy this mucus thing that was going up inside my skull either so those two things alone are just sort of practical health benefits that I appreciate out of keto and that's why for me this is probably it for pasta I don't see myself really going back to it in fact in terms of resistant starch experiments this is probably probably going to be the end for me I feel that I have satisfied my curiosity on it and overall what I've discovered is yeah it there does appear to be a way to reduce the glucose impact of some of these foods but it doesn't reduce it to the point that I feel it should be part of my way of eating however my way of eating is my way of eating so you can decide for yourself if this means that pasta or potatoes or rice or bread can be part of your low carb lifestyle if prepared in a way that creates a resistant starch so I hope you found these videos interesting if you did please click that like button if you really liked it click that thanks button buy me a cup of coffee and over here I'm going to put a couple of videos I'll put one that has the playlist of all my resistance starch experiments so far and then also my favorite keto noodles right down here thanks for watching