"Also, I've been reading that the Italians gorge on Pasta all the time, and they have a low CVD and heart attack rate."

WOW, this spoke to me on a deep level. I mean, if the whole nation is healthy how can pasta be bad for us ? Also if your friend was OK after three weeks what can one pack of spaghtetti do ?

And as long pasta is from Whole foods I think we are safe here. A week back I would say "but DOC, DOC" but we musn't blindly emulate the past so this kind of experiments are in orders. I might even top you with some spaghettieis.

Cheers Jack !

Pasta, even pasta from Whole Foods, has gluten in it unless you are specifically seeking out a gluten-free brand of pasta. So even though the starch itself won't get you down for too long, it's the other aspects of grains (phytates/antinutrients, gluten's ravaging of the intestinal wall, among other concerns) that make grain-based pasta a systemic threat.

If you really want noodles with walnut oil, you might try rice noodles made from white rice (so there's no hull remaining - such as in brown rice - to otherwise harm your system). However, this is a starchy cheat, so maybe best after a workout. Maybe also a nice large salmon fillet to counter all of the O-6 from your walnut oil?

And finally...just because Italians are consuming pasta and bread with reckless abandon doesn't mean it won't come back to bite them in the long run via diabetes, weight gained, etc. As we've heard: Tolerated is not optimal.

p.s. I love walnut oil integrated into a custard made of eggs, coconut milk, and banana.

But again, every single meal in America is wheat, vegetable oils and processed meats and cheese with a billion preservatives and junk. At least Italy is fairly nourished and avoiding massive omega 6, trans fats, excessive sugar and whatnot. I don't see the SID producing centenarians who stay vital the whole time as the norm. Sure they have some but I think we can do a little better. Robb Wolf mentioned Italy once, he says they have a super high standard of food quality. And it tends to catch up with them. So someone isn't dying in the first half of life. They're pudgy in the second.

Other factors tie into health too. It is fallacious to observe X population as not completely and utterly dying and then take a particular element of their diet and proclaim that to be innocuous. We need a better metric for health than the average earthling.

Ok, first of all, I don't know where this idea that Italians are particularly healthy comes from. I used to live in Italy and they are in general healthier than Americans, because they don't eat as much processed crap as we do. However, I would say they are far from being super healthy. I started coming down with IBS while I was in Italy, and I assume it had to do with the mass quantities of pasta that I ate. BTW, Italians don't always eat mass quantities of pasta. They very often just have a small portion, in a first course (Il primo piatto), not the spaghetti as a mono-meal, heaped high on a plate.