#415 Catch a Cold

So I came down with a little bug. It was inevitable. I mean, chances are good I would be susceptible to at least one of the many possible jillions of viruses that evolution throws at us slow-moving humans every day. And since it’s likely I had something relatively like it before, and since I keep my immune system at peak condition with exercise, the right foods, and staying up too late at night, I only got a small touch of it. But I’m sure it will pass quickly cause I watch my health and eat plenty of pizza. Yep, pizza. I read something interesting the other day. It was about the chemical lycopene. Lycopene, as you may remember, is much trumpeted as a valuable ingredient in ketchup. It’s always nice in the health-conscious marketing niche that a condiment can actually make such a claim. Ketchup, the much-maligned red cousin in the French fries infarction family, has got too much bad press. Especially when the lax government started trying to tell people that it counted as a vegetable in poor kids’ school lunches. Oh yeah, I remember that menu, Ketchup was a vegetable and turkey gravy counted as the meat on Thanksgiving. In any event, lycopene is a very powerful anti-oxidant, and, as everyone knows, anti-oxidants are against oxygen, which although it appears to be a good thing to have in your lungs is not good when hooked up with other molecules and floating around your well-governed bloodstream acting all free and radical. If you’re like me, you seek out natural sources for dietary things so you’ll be happy to know that you can get lycopene from tomatoes, watermelon, pink grapefruit, pink guava, papaya, and rosehip. However, the odd thing about lycopene is it actually gets better and more available to your body if you get it in processed food. That’s right, bucking the trend of all that’s natural and holistic, lycopene is better for you if you actually do get it in ketchup. Or canned tomatoes. And even better, your body can get even more of it if that processed tomato is added to oil-rich dishes like spaghetti and pizza. Is this not cool or what? You get a lot of free radicals from eating processed foods. But processed foods can help you get rid of free radicals. But not just any processed food. Hamburgers don’t qualify, unless you drench them in ketchup like a potsmoking preschooler. But pizza. Pizza the divine food. The food that is perfect anytime, hot, cold, or indifferent. The food you can carve out of the hairy mold in your crisper and still savor. The food you can dig out of the back of the couch cushions and still munch. Pizza is healthy. At far more tomato per pie squared, pizza is damn near a freaking health food. I haven’t felt this good since they found out red wine fights heart disease. Now will somebody please discover an anti-carcinogen in beer?
America, ya gotta love it.