Pasta losing its appeal?

Behind closed doors, dinner tables are getting less doughy. Grains, still ubiquitous in diets around the globe, are losing favor as a result of a growing fear that they might be adding inches to our guts, or discomfort to our stomachs. And there is, perhaps, no better example of this phenomenon than what's happened to one of the world's favorite foods: pasta.
Simply, people are eating less of it. The data show that the cheap and easy meal hasn't disappeared from diets, but diners aren't consuming it with the gusto they once did.
The trend can be seen in the North America, where sales of dried pasta have fallen by 6 percent since 2009, according to data from market research firm Euromonitor. A report published in April by Mintel projects that the U.S. decline will continue through at least 2019 for the pasta category.
It can be seen in Australia, too, where the market for pasta has contracted by almost 8 percent since 2010.

The popular Italian food is also losing its luster in Europe, where several countries have scaled back in recent years. In Germany, dried pasta sales have dipped by 12 percent since their peak in 2008. In Greece, they have fallen by 15 percent over the same period.

Even in Italy, the birthplace of pasta, people are growing wary of the carb-heavy food. Sales of dried pasta have plummeted by more than 25 percent since 2009 in Italy. "Italians—particularly women—increasingly see pasta as fattening, boring and time-consuming," the Wall Street Journal wrote in 2013.