Few nutrients are more maligned than carbohydrates. The theory goes that pasta, bread and rice must be avoided in order to stay healthy and svelte.
Carb-fearing goes way back to at least the 1860s, when William Banting, a retired British undertaker, wrote a pamphlet on his own low-carb diet, designed to tackle his “corpulence” (think of him as an early influencer). Low-carb diets have been in and out of fashion ever since.
Bread, however, has been fuelling humans for millennia. Rice is one of the most consumed crops in the world. And Italy — the country that eats the most pasta per person — also has the lowest obesity rate in Europe. Both the Mediterranean diet and the diet of the blue zones — the