italian pasta

Pasta Meal Nutrition

If you love to eat pasta, you’ll love this fact even more: pasta is a great partner that can actually help you maintain healthy eating.

A 1-to-2-cup serving of cooked pasta is low in calories (200), low in fat (1 gram, with no saturated fat), cholesterol-free, and sodium-free (unless you add salt to the cooking water). Pasta is a good source of thiamin, iron, riboflavin, and niacin, and provides 2 grams of dietary fiber and 7 grams of protein per serving.

Pasta is a great way to get grain-based food into your diet. If you eat a reasonably sized portion of cooked pasta – 1 to 2 cups* – you’ll be getting 2 to 4 of the USDA recommended daily servings of grain-based foods.

In addition, pasta is enriched with folic acid, a form of folate and an important B-vitamin that reduces the risk of some serious types of birth defects when consumed before and during early pregnancy. (Studies are underway to clarify whether folate decreases the risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, and certain types of cancer.) A 2-ounce serving of dry pasta supplies the equivalent of about 100 micrograms of folic acid, or 25 percent of the recommended daily intake. Barilla pasta has a higher level of folate per serving, providing 30 percent of the recommended daily intake.

And as a carbohydrate, pasta is a great energy source for your body and your brain. You may be familiar with the increased attention being paid to low-carb (carbohydrate) diets. For information on how these low-carb diets don’t work and may cause serious health problems, read about the dangers of low-carb diets.

Also in this section, you’ll find other helpful nutrition information about pasta and its role in healthy eating. Discover what makes a healthy pasta meal and why pasta is a low Glycemic Index food; explore the Mediterranean diet, one of the world’s ways to healthy eating; and find out why pasta is an excellent source of energy for athletes. You’ll also learn that when you toss your pasta with tomato sauce, you receive the many benefits of lycopene.

*2 oz. uncooked dry pasta yields 1-2 cups cooked pasta, depending on the pasta shape.

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