Cindy Crawford revealed how much easier it was in the 1990s, when size zero wasn’t a thing and people thought that a bowl of pasta was essentially a health food: ‘Remember back in the 1990s, when people thought that a big bowl of pasta was a low calorie option? Today, eating that is like eating a sundae,’ Cindy said in a recent interview. ‘Fortunately, we weren’t expected to be a size 0 or 2 in my era...’
This got us thinking: the 2000s, and the Atkins anti-carb hysteria, really did damage our attitudes towards the humble pasta dish.
Madison, an actress from London, avoids pasta like the plague when she’s trying to eat well for certain roles: ‘If I eat an entire bowl of pasta, I feel like I look like one of those Buddha statues. I actually try never to eat pasta, but it makes sense that Cindy Crawford used to eat it. She probably ate in moderation, and that’s something I can’t seem to do. I’d prefer to eat a massive plate of healthy stuff, than a normal portion of pasta.’
READ MORE: The Fat You Eat Is The Fat You Wear, And Other Things You Learn During Fashion Week
And that, it seems is the reason that the 1990s supermodels had incredibly slim, out-of-this world bodies despite the fact they ate pasta with gay abandon. So maybe pasta isn’t the enemy we’ve all been indoctrinated to believe it is?
According to dietician Kirsten Crothers, the 2000s definitely made us all go a bit carb-loopy. ‘Basically, there is so much incorrect and confusing information out there, meaning that people no longer understand food,’ she says/rants. ‘I think avoiding things like pasta is also in line with people who avoid bread because they think carbohydrates make them fat. Yet the majority of people actually don’t know what a carbohydrate is and it’s actually recommended that you include foods like this as part of a healthy diet.’
Not only are they low calorie, but they tend to fill us up – so it’s not about the poor old much-maligned pasta, but the portion sizes. ‘Carbohydrates tend to be what people over-indulge in, to the extent that we’ve lost sight of what a normal portion is. On top of all this, people also think it’s fashionable to be following a low-carb diet.’
Cindy’s nostalgia for a time when we ate pasta free of guilt also hearkens back to a time when obesity affected just 15% of the UK population. Now, in a time when a bowl of pasta is viewed as a massive indulgence, approximately 1 in 4 adults in the UK are classified as obese. These stats sort of speak for themselves: there’s nothing wrong with pasta, provided you’re not eating 17 bowls of it for every meal.
Oh, how we wish we could go back to the 1990s...
Check out this recipe for an ace pasta dish here.
Like this? You might also be interested in...
This Photographer Has Brilliantly Captured What Celeb Diets Actually Look Like
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.