Refrigerating dried or homemade pasta may be beneficial to health, but also may alter how pasta breaks down upon chewing.

When cooking every day becomes too impractical, many people resort to meal prepping. This can mean a constant cycle of refrigerating and reheating meals. In the case of pasta, this process actually might be be beneficial for your health.

Controlling glucose levels is critical to decreasing the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Previous studies have shown that eating reheated pasta produced lower blood glucose levels than consuming freshly boiled pasta. Lower glucose levels were obtained because a new type of starch, called resistant starch, forms at cold temperatures. In our gut, enzymes break starch down into units of glucose. But for this resistant starch, degradation is slower, so less glucose forms. Do different types of pasta produce the same result? And does harsh or mild chewing affect starch degradation?

To find some answers, a group of researchers dug into two types of pasta: dried spaghetti and fresh homemade tagliatelle. And to simulate pasta particles produced upon chewing, they cut cooked pasta to two different sizes.

Results showed that cooled or reheated dry pasta only produced a small change in starch degradation than in freshly boiled pasta. However, with small-sized fresh pasta, the researchers saw a sharper decrease in starch degradation compared to dry pasta.

The researchers presume that the non-starch ingredients in pasta might point to additional factors for the formation of resistant starch. They also argued that the size of pasta particles formed during chewing may have greater effect than the process of cooling and reheating pasta. They proposed that industrial pasta production should consider pasta sizes and shapes that will naturally break into large pieces.