A New Form of Spaghetti Has Been Designed to Reduce the Risk of Heart Disease

Scientists have developed ‘super spaghetti’, a variant of the normal form made from barley flour and this new form of noodles is supposed to reduce the risk of heart disease. Super spaghetti was developed by the scientists in Italy and Spain and the report is published in, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Barley is rich in fiber, antioxidants, and vitamin E, and is a very popular ingredient in different functional foods that have supplementation with healthy additives. Most of the functional foods are considered to be healthy foods. American Chemical Society reports that the popularity of these products has created an industry which may be worth more than $176 billion by 2013.

Vito Verardo, PhD, of the University of Bologna in Italy, and Ana Maria Gomez-Caravaca, PhD, of the University of Granada in Spain, feels that soon most of the products may have labels saying ‘reduces the risk of heart disease’ or ‘good source of dietary fiber’ because of the addition of barley.

To make super spaghetti a functional food, they added barley flour made from the most nutritious part of barley. As expected spaghetti made of barley flour had more antioxidants and fiber content when compared to the traditional form of spaghetti made of semolina. But when gluten is added to the barley flour to improve the cooking quality, the antioxidant power reduced. According to the researchers, this spaghetti has adequate requirements to make health claims about the product.