The next time you’ve had a less-than-great day, or your mood dips, or you listen to two or more Lewis Capaldi songs in a row, apparently, there’s one simple way to make yourself feel better: by eating a bowl of pasta. That’s the word, according to a study conducted by the Behavioral and Brain Lab at the Free University of Languages and Communication IULM in Milan, Italy.
For this study, IULM researchers recruited 40 participants between the ages of 25 and 55 years old, measured their physical and neurological changes as they ate pasta, and then compared those responses to the reactions the participants had while listening to their favorite songs or watching a sporting event. According to the researchers, eating pasta was more effective than sports or music at “activating cognitive memory processes,” which is a fancy way of saying that it helped the participants remember or recall specific things (although the researchers have not elaborated on what those things were).
Eating pasta also bested both music and sporting events when it comes to generating positive emotions, which makes us wonder how you say “Buffalo Bills fan” in Italian. Finally, the researchers watched and quantified the participants’ facial expressions and determined that a bowl of pasta was equally likely to be an “indicator of happiness” as that person’s favorite song, and it was significantly more likely to generate positive facial expressions than watching sport.
“Through this study, science has put itself at the service of emotions to certify that pasta and happiness are one,” Vincenzo Russo, a Professor of Consumer Psychology and Neuromarketing at IULM University and the Founder and Coordinator of the Neuromarketing Behavior & Brain Lab IULM, said in a statement. “The results tell us that it is precisely when we eat pasta that we are most emotionally active. It is, therefore, the real act of tasting and savoring the dish in its full flavor to stimulate the most positive memories and emotions.”
The participants were also asked to answer the question “When do you eat pasta?” and the most common responses were related to having meals with one’s family, with “friendship,” or just “when I feel happy.” In addition, when asked how happy eating pasta made them feel, 76% of the study participants responded, “A lot.” Less than half (40%) of respondents said that they considered pasta to be a comfort food, but perhaps that’s due to Italy’s high per-capita pasta consumption: the researchers added that almost all Italians (a whopping 99%) eat pasta an average of five times every week.
As interesting as this study might be, it’s worth taking with a grain of salt … or with one strand of spaghetti. As of this writing, it has not been peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal, and it was also conducted on behalf of Unione Italiana Food, a trade organization that represents — you guessed it — Italy’s pasta producers.
“We have always known that a good plate of pasta makes people happy, but we did not know why and to what extent,” Riccardo Felicetti, president of Unione Italiana Food’s pasta makers. “Now, the official confirmation comes from this research that we commissioned from IULM, in which pasta is chosen as the food of happiness, or as we pasta-makers like to say, with the best happiness/price ratio.”
So go ahead and have that bowl of pasta the next time you need a little mood boost. We’re talking to you too, Lewis Capaldi.
