Point 1: You're right. My mom, born in Italy, still makes homemade pasta. Flour, water, and EGGS. Very filling and satisfying....you just can't eat huge bowls of it like you do with storebought. But of course storebought pasta has very little protein in it because protein is more expensive to incorporate into a manufacturing process than simply adding carbs.
Point 2: As others have pointed out, Italian portions are much smaller than American ones.
Point 3: Pasta/pizza sauce in this country is made with *sugar*. Blech. Now sauces are very regional and family-specific so I can't say this applies to all Italian sauces, but my mom would NEVER EVER put sugar into a tomato sauce.
Point 4: Sugar intake in general is lower among Italians. We drank water at dinner, not soda. Our "dolci", sweets, are less sugary than the average American dessert.
People are trying to reduce this to pasta = good/no good instead of looking at the entire cultural context.
Yeah, for the average American, eating large portions of zero-protein carb-loaded pasta with sugary sauce, and washing it down with soda and ultrasweet cookies, yeah, you are definitely going to have trouble with that carb intake that the average Italian might well not have.
But I believe the premise. I was unhealthily thin the whole time I was single, eating an Italian diet that included lots of pasta. I could hide behind a freaking pencil. Now that I've gotten away from that diet into a more "American one" with crappy bread, sugary drinks, carb-loaded snacks.....totally different story.