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Italian wins Ig Nobel prize for pizza's health benefits

Can beat heart attacks, cancer - as long as it's made in Italy

Redazione Ansa

(ANSA) - Rome, September 13 - An Italian researcher has won this year's Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine for a study on the health benefits of pizza - as long as it's made in Italy.
    In the citation on zany discoveries that "make you laugh, then think", the Annals of Improbable Research and the University of Harvard said Silvao Gallus "has furnished evidence that pizza can protect you from disease and death, as long as it is made and eaten in Italy".
    Gallus, of the Mario Negri Institute in Milan and the University of Maastricht, said in receiving the award for his weird science that "a good pizza comprised all the virtues of the Mediterranean Diet".
    He said the prime Italian food export to the world can ward off heart attacks and some forms of cancer, provided that the ingredients are Mediterranean and not made according to foreign "interpretations".
    "We found that pizza consumption in Italy was protective for many chronic diseases that are known to be influenced by diet: digestive tract cancers and infarction," said Gallus, head of the Laboratory of Lifestyle Epidemiology at the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri in Milan.
    Like many of the winners, Gallus, a renowned scientist, was thrilled to win an Ig Nobel.
    "I am honored to have obtained this achievement for a bizarre but important award," he said.
   

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