Italian scientists have created a new type of pasta that could help us survive heart attacks

Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP

It could only have happened in Italy, the land of linguine, vermicelli and tagliatelle - scientists in Tuscany have developed a new type of pasta that can help ward off heart attacks.

While health experts might frown on people gorging on too much spaghetti carbonara or creamy linguine, the new pasta is being touted as beneficial to well-being.

It is made from a mixture of standard durum wheat flour mixed with whole-grain barley flour, which is rich in a fibre called beta-glucan which enchances the growth of new blood vessels.

Those blood vessels then form “natural bypasses” in the event of a heart attack, according to the researchers in Pisa.
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Scientists tested their theory on laboratory mice, feeding them the newly-developed pasta and then inducing cardiac arrest.

Mice which had been fed the barley pasta survived in greater numbers than a control group of mice which had eaten ordinary durum wheat pasta.

Eat spaghetti, cheat death: it might sound too good to be true, but Italian researchers say they’ve cracked a recipe that could help reduce deaths from heart attacks.

"Long-term Intake of Pasta Containing Barley (1–3)Beta-D-Glucan Increases Neovascularization-mediated Cardioprotection through Endothelial Upregulation of Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor and Parkin"

Read Complete published study, medical researchers at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna’s Institute of Life Sciences in Pisa developed a special kind of pasta enriched with barley flour.

The barley contains a substance called beta-glucan that is known to help the body form new blood vessels – which could serve as a “natural bypass” in the event of a heart attack, the researchers said.

To test their theory, the team fed barley-enriched pasta to mice and then induced cardiac injury. They found that more of those mice survived than mice that had received regular wheat pasta.

In addition, the mice that survived in the control group had more damage to their hearts than the barley-fed mice that made it.
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“It’s the first time that the formation of natural bypasses was encouraged via functional food, such as pasta with barley beta-glucan,” lead researcher Vincenzo Lionetti told Ansa news agency.

The team hopes that enriched pasta will eventually prove “a friend to the heart” in humans. 

The newly-developed pasta, which contains barley, can help ward off heart attacks, researchers sayCREDIT: ALAMY

The barley-munching mice also sustained less damage to their hearts, examination revealed.

The researchers, from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, revealed the results of their research on the website Scientific Reports.

They said the new pasta “makes the body more resistant to stress and to coronary artery disease.”

“It’s the first time that the formation of natural bypasses was encouraged via functional food, [in this case] pasta with barley beta-glucan,” said Prof Vincenzo Lionetti, who led the study.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show that a sustained dietary intake of pasta enriched with [beta-glucan] safely increases coronary collaterals…and reduces mortality.”

Until now, “techniques to promote collateral artery growth required surgical treatments, the use of stem cells extracted from bone marrow or gene therapy,” said Prof Lionetti.

But the barley-enriched pasta had the effect of creating a “biological bypass” that naturally enhanced heart health.

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Bitter or not? New tool predicts which compounds taste Bitter

Everything from coffee to beer to dark chocolate to medicines contain a diverse array of bitter compounds.                                        Image: Shutterstock/AndreyCherkasov

Humans have 25 different taste receptors that register a range of bitter chemical compounds in everything from coffee and beer to dark chocolate and medicine. And yet, while humans can easily recognize bitterness, predicting whether a chemical compound will taste bitter is no simple task. Now, researchers have developed BitterPredict, a machine learning tool that predicts whether a chemical tastes bitter. The approach, described in Scientific Reports, could help food scientists and pharmaceutical developers pick up on the bitter drivers in their products.
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Bitter compounds are incredibly diverse, notes chemosensory scientist and co-author Masha Niv of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They can be ions, peptides, glucosinolates, and more. So the researchers began by compiling a set of known non bitter compounds drawn from the scientific literature, as well as a set of known bitter ones drawn primarily from BitterDB, a database that Niv curates. They then used these compounds to build BitterPredict, which evaluates the relationship between bitterness and physical and chemical characters like molecular mass, bond number, and electric charge. And because bitterness is sometimes linked to poisons, BitterPredict also considers indicators of toxicity, such as possessing a similar structure to a molecule known to cross the blood-brain barrier. By associating particular combinations of characters with bitterness, the model can then predict whether a new compound is bitter.
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The team tested the model using the sets of known bitter and non bitter chemicals and found that it could correctly classified a compound as bitter or not around 80 percent of the time. Compounds with positive charges were more likely to be bitter while water soluble ones were more likely not to be. But no single trait could predict bitterness alone. Indeed, the team’s approach is interesting because it shows how multiple chemical properties can combine to make a compound taste bitter, says chemist Matthew Hartings of American University.

Niv also used BitterPredict to explore a random set of around 30,000 molecules, as well as additional sets of molecules found in food, drugs, and natural products (primarily derived from plants). The tool predicted that around 40 percent of the random and food sets were bitter, as well as 66 percent of the drug and 77 percent of the natural product sets.

Niv doesn’t know why bitterness is so abundant in nature. But one possibility stems from an arms race between plants and herbivores. “The evolutionary idea is that plants evolved toxic compounds to not be eaten,” she explains. “Then we evolved the ability to identify toxic compounds by bitter taste receptors. Then maybe some of these compounds are no longer toxic because being bitter is enough to not be eaten.”

The ability to predict bitterness could be powerful. Pharmaceutical companies have already contacted Niv about her new tool. If a medication tastes bad, a patient might resist taking it. An HIV drug was recalled in Uganda, for example, because the pills were so bitter that many patients stopped treatment. Pharmaceutical companies would like to know early on if the drugs they’re developing are bitter pills to swallow. “In food, it’s also really important to understand which component is responsible for a bitter taste, especially in cases where you get bitterness that is undesirable in milk and soy products,” says Niv.
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Hartings sees other applications. “These types of studies speak more broadly to questions about how our nervous system works, how we experience flavor, how our cells interact with the molecules that come in contact with them,” he says. “It’s a much more interesting question than ‘Is it bitter or not?’” Still, he’s excited about Niv’s next question: How bitter is it? Niv’s group is collecting more data so they can begin to predict the intensity of bitterness.

For researchers who want to test their own compounds, the team shares the BitterPredict code and they plan to make the tool available on a publicly accessible server in the near future.
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