Tuna & Pasta Salad
Sixty-two grams of protein and eight grams of fat. In a cold pasta salad. Whole wheat penne and garden peas go through boiling water, tuna gets flaked straight from the can, and everything folds into a dressing that is almost entirely nonfat yogurt.
Fifteen minutes from cutting board to plate, 18 grams of fiber from two sources, and no cooking skill beyond boiling water. The kind of meal that stacks macros like it was engineered but eats like someone just threw lunch together.
Ingredients
- penne, whole wheat 3 ounces
- garden peas (frozen) 0.75 cup
- celery 1 stalk
- red onion 0.25
- garlic 1 clove
- mayonnaise 0.5 tablespoon
- yogurt, nonfat 2 fluid ounces
- tuna, in water 5 ounces
Method
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Cook the penne according to the package instructions.
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Transfer the garden peas to a bowl and pour boiling water over them. Let them sit for five minutes.
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Slice the celery into thin pieces, finely chop the onion and press the garlic.
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Combine the mayonnaise with yogurt, celery, onion and garlic in a bowl and stir well.
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Drain the tuna, flake it with a fork and add it to the yogurt mixture.
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Drain the penne and garden peas, then add them to the yogurt mixture. Stir everything together and season with salt and pepper.
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Serve the pasta salad in a bowl.
Run the cooked penne under cold water before adding it to the yogurt mixture. Hot pasta thins yogurt-based dressings and turns the salad watery within minutes.
Press the garlic directly into the yogurt dressing. Researchers found that allicin from crushed garlic shows zero inhibitory effect on Lactobacillus acidophilus, the live probiotic culture in yogurt. Garlic's fructans actually serve as a prebiotic carbon source for those bacteria. The ingredient that seasons the dressing is also feeding its live cultures.
Garlic + Yogurt · DOIBehind this recipe
Can my body actually use 62 grams of protein from one meal?
Yes. Researchers tracked whole-body protein balance after meals containing up to 100 grams of protein and found the body continued using it for muscle repair and maintenance. There was no ceiling where extra protein was wasted. The old 30-gram-per-meal limit has been debunked by direct measurement. This salad's 62 grams from tuna, peas, yogurt, and whole wheat all contribute.
Read the full evidence reviewWhy is the dressing almost all yogurt instead of mayo?
The ratio is 60ml nonfat yogurt to 8ml mayonnaise. That keeps the entire recipe at 8 grams of fat while giving the dressing enough body to coat the pasta. Mayonnaise alone would push the fat well above 20 grams. The yogurt does the structural work, the mayo just rounds the flavor.
Does the fiber in this salad actually matter for fat loss?
A meta-analysis pooling 62 clinical trials found that higher fiber intake was associated with greater fat loss, with a median effective dose of about 8 grams per day. This salad delivers 18 grams from two sources: whole wheat penne (cereal fiber) and garden peas (legume fiber).
Read the full evidence review
