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The ketchup story

President Richard Nixon ate his cheese with ketchup, the Japanese eat rice with it, and the Reagan administration once tried to classify ketchup as a vegetable. Ketchup has become the sidekick of fast foods all over the world. Even the samosa has learned to live with it.

But ketchup is no modern food. The word ketchup probably derives from the Chinese "ke-tsiap", a pickled fish sauce flavoured by salty spices. The sauce was carried to Malaysia and Indonesia, where it was discovered by the Dutch and the English seafarers of the 17th Century. Tomatoes are a late addition to ketchup - beginning in the 18th century.

Modern ketchup usually contains tomato sauce, vinegar, salt, sugar, onion, garlic and spices like cinnamon, cloves, mace, allspice, nutmeg, ginger and pepper.

Hundred grams of regular tomato ketchup contains around 100 calories. The high amounts of sugar and salt added to ketchup bring out it primal flavours and make it less of a health food.

Ketchup is rich in lycopene, an antioxidant found in tomatoes. In fact, ketchup has a higher lycopene level than raw tomato because cooking releases the lycopene trapped in cells. Antioxidants fight free radicals and may help prevent heart disease and cancer- but these claims are unproven.

What makes ketchup a health risk is the company — greasy snacks — it keeps on your plate. Also ketchup is not very healthful by itself.

RAJIV. M

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