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Carbohydrate wars: pasta hits back

There comes a time when a besmirched, besieged food must step up to the plate and defend its honor, or at least its carbohydrate count.

Here in the land that has loved and cooked it best, pasta is about to make its stand.

For three days next week, physicians, chefs, pasta manufacturers and other pasta partisans will gather in Italy's capital for a full-boiled response to the advances of the low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, which threatens to put rigatoni on the run.

"We're not dancing anymore," said K. Dun Gifford, the president of Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust, the Boston nutrition research and advocacy group that is organizing the conference.

"This is `Pasta Fights Back.' It needs to," he said.

Gifford was using the nickname that he and other participants have given the event. Officially titled Healthy Pasta Meals, it is more than a summit of experts and entrepreneurs who are invested, gastronomically or financially, in the fate of fusilli. It is a telltale moment in the carbohydrate wars, a clear sign of just how tough it is these days to be a starch.

What with the Atkins and South Beach diets, Sugar Busters and Protein Power, the carbohydrate is viewed by many Americans as a positively menacing macronutrient, the evil root of all love handles.

"It's a frenzy," said Susan Toussaint, director of marketing for the American Italian Pasta Co. of Kansas City, Missouri, referring to the widespread shunning of carbohydrates in the US.

Toussaint said that over the last 12 months, her company, a conference sponsor, had a roughly 5 percent drop in US grocery-store sales of its pasta.

She said that the decline was typical of the pasta industry and that one reason was the vilification of all carbohydrates. "Pasta's getting lumped in the same category as Krispy Kreme," she said.

"It's not fair. All carbohydrates are not created equal," she said.

That is the overarching message of the conference. Its many sponsors and patrons also include Barilla, a leading Italian pasta manufacturer. Although few Italians have begun kneeling to the low-carbohydrate gods, trends do tend to travel across the Atlantic.

Rome was chosen as the conference site for the semiotic and theatrical garnishes it provides. What better setting in which to praise pasta -- and to point out that Italians, who eat it regularly, are generally slimmer, and live longer, than Americans?

Gifford has drafted scientists from around the world to make pasta's case.

"We're doing damage control for pasta, if you like," said David Jenkins, who teaches metabolism and nutrition at the University of Toronto's medical school.

Jenkins is an authority on the glycemic index, a measure of how quickly food is metabolized and how suddenly it raises blood sugar. Steep jolts are widely considered bad for health and weight. He said that pasta's dense, compact nature means that it is digested more slowly than other starches.

Jenkins plans to explain all of this at the conference, which begins on Monday at the Cavalieri Hilton outside Rome's historic center. Also on the agenda are discussions of everything from cooking to cardiovascular disease, from the properties of wheat to fad diets through the ages.
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