How Many Carbs Olive Garden Spagetti And Meatballs

The Olive Garden's Pasta Pass is back.

All 2,000 cards — $100 for an individual, $300 for family, for seven weeks of unlimited food and soda — sold out in one second flat online. Now the chain is holding social media contests to dole out a few more to obsessive Olive Gardeners.

But it's not all good. Rebecca Blake, Mount Sinai Beth Israel's senior director of clinical nutrition, says that eating nothing but pasta for seven weeks straight isn't so much a tasty good time as it is hazardous to your health. Here are some of the possible risks.

Weight gain

"You'll definitely gain weight unless you're Michael Phelps and burning 8,000 calories a day," Blake says. "If you eat an extra 1,000 calories worth of pasta every day for seven weeks, you could gain 10 to 15 pounds in that period of time."

A single bowl of Olive Garden's spaghetti and meatballs clocks in at 740 calories. The US Department of Agriculture recommends 2,600 calories per day for moderately active men ages 31-35, and 2,000 calories for a woman of the same age range and activity level.

"It really encourages this idea of becoming hypersatiated, or too full," adds Blake. "And we see that people who regularly become too full after they eat struggle to maintain a healthy body weight. It is normal once in a while to eat a bit too much, but this type of access to mass consumption of high calorie pasta dishes is really not in anyone's best interest."

Plus, "you'll probably feel fairly lousy. I'm only speculating, but your clothes will be tight, you'll probably have less energy."

Diabetes:

Too many carbs could be potentially dangerous to diabetics. Shutterstock.com

"Refined carbs [like pasta], if you're a diabetic, can actually be dangerous, because you could have very elevated blood glucose levels," says Blake.

"If you're not a diabetic, your body can probably handle the carb load, but over a period of seven weeks, to abuse your body with food like that could put you at risk for diabetes. So, if you were kind of borderline, it could throw you over the edge."

High blood pressure:

Weight gain can lead to higher blood pressure. Shutterstock.com

The weight gain from nearly two months of gorging could send your blood pressure soaring. "High blood pressure is about six times more common in people who are obese than in those who are normal weight," Blake says. And high blood pressure can lead to a stroke. Or . . .

Heart attack:

"Just the alfredo sauce is like a heart attack in a bowl," Blake says. A bowl of fettuccine alfredo at the Olive Garden contains 45 grams of fat and 27 grams of saturated fat.

Blake warns that being overweight increases your risk of heart attack by about 32 percent, and that being obese raises your risk for heart attack by about 81 percent.

Be that as it may, Jessica Dinon, a spokeswoman for the Olive Garden says, "We strive to provide an abundance of choice and variety for our guests, which is why our Never Ending Pasta Bowl lineup includes whole wheat linguine, tri-colored penne and gluten-free rotini."

Nor does everyone go to town on pasta, she says: "Last year, we also saw that some Pasta Pass holders used the pass for just soup or salad on some visits."