December 4, 2025
Why Leftover Pizza Would possibly Truly Be More healthy
Researchers have found that cooling starchy meals—from pizza to rice—creates “resistant starch,” a carb that behaves like fiber and alters your blood sugar response
This video is a part of “Improvements In: Sort 1 Diabetes,” an editorially unbiased particular report that was produced with monetary help from Vertex.
Tom Lum: On the floor, this will appear to be your garden-variety Web enjoyable truth, the sort that you simply half keep in mind and attempt to retell at a celebration, like …
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[Lum pretends to be a guest at a party. He is holding a slice of pizza and talking over music.]
Lum: Do you know I learn someplace that leftover pizza is definitely higher for—uh—so how have you learnt Lauren?
However the secret is that that is simply the floor of the very fact, and the deeper we go, the extra enjoyable and weirder the science will get.
As a result of your first thought on listening to that is most likely “Why?” Why is leftover pizza more healthy for me? And the reply has to do with what occurs once you cool the scrumptious crust. Whenever you cool a pizza to beneath 40 levels Fahrenheit, among the starches within the dough will begin to mingle collectively to kind these lengthy chains referred to as resistant starches.
They resist digestion, and one other phrase for a carbohydrate that resists digestion is fiber! And even when you reheat the pizza, the chains keep intact, so your physique doesn’t break them right down to sugar. They largely move via.
This might assist cut back blood sugar spikes for folks with diabetes or individuals who simply want extra fiber for a more healthy intestine. And this appears to work for lots of starches, like rice, pasta, potatoes—even beans and lentils. Heating then cooling the starch modifications its properties. It’s like tempering chocolate or forging a stronger metal.
However we are able to go even deeper into this enjoyable truth as a result of one other query you might need is “How?” How did scientists research, analyze, and determine this out? And for that, we have to go to the precise papers.
And that is the place you’ll discover electron microscope pictures of previous rice, displaying these lengthy starchy fibers forming after which sticking round via “simulated digestion.” And also you’ll additionally discover research on people to attempt to measure these well being modifications, like this one the place courageous contributors needed to be on the lab at 6 A.M. to eat previous rice for science, which that they had to take action that nothing else they ate that day interfered with their measurements.
This research additionally measured how lengthy contributors had been chewing the rice, which can seem to be overkill till they level out digestion begins within the mouth. And it’s this intelligent consideration to element that’s a very powerful half as a result of that’s the way you get the enjoyable truth.
Like, people have been consuming meals the whole time people have existed, however the way in which it interacts with our physique is so advanced that we’ve solely simply realized that apparently our fridge is a forge for fiber. And I believe that and the main points of the research are a lot extra fascinating than the enjoyable truth. It simply may not be the very best at events.
[Lum pretends to be a guest at a party again.]
Lum: Hello, it’s Tom. Do you know digestion begins on the mouth?
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