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The hot bread

Pizza has been popular from the 3rd Century BC, but it needs to have the right toppings to be a healthy option

PHOTO: VINO JOHN

CUT DOWN THE CHEESE Add more vegetables to make your pizza nutritious

Pizza is the quintessential fast food, but Virgil and Cato would be surprised to see it called a modern food. As long ago as the 3rd Century BC, Marcus Porcius Cato wrote of the Romans eating a flat round bread with herbs, cheese and honey as toppings. The city of Pompeii, entombed by the lava from Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, reveals archaeological evidence of baked flat breads and what might have been pizza joints.

Pizza is now synonymous with American culture, but it was as late as the 1940s and the 1950s, when American GIs stationed in Italy during World War II came back with firmly-established pizza-cravings and pizza-loving Italian-Americans like Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio and Marlon Brando made their food preferences known, that the round toppings-laden crust became a national icon. Songs with lines like "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that amore" (Dean Martin) certainly helped pizza's popularity.

The early pizzas were topped with cheese, meat and herbs. It wasn't until the 19th Century that the people of Naples, Italy, realised that tomatoes were not poisonous and the red fruit became standard as pizza topping. Modern pizzas use tomatoes, garlic, cheese, onions, meat, sausage slices, spinach, brinjal, shrimp, chicken, herbs, peppers, mushrooms, anchovies and olives as toppings.

Pizzas can be nutritious: after all, only fresh vegetables and herbs are used as toppings. But most pizzas incorporate cheese, and there are very few foods with so much artery-clogging tendency. Pizzas are also high in sodium; pizzas topped with meat other than chicken tend to combine the highest of calories, sodium and saturated fat. Atherosclerosis has its origins in the diet and exercise habits of childhood and teenage life. The pizza-loving Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can do flips and fight crime on a diet consisting solely of pizzas, but in real life, the flips might as well go all the way to a coronary unit.

RAJIV. M

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