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The ketchup story
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Ketchup provides a sour edge to many snacks. But is it good for the health?
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IN BAD COMPANY Ketchup has become the sidekick of fast foods all over the world
Shake and shake the catsup bottle, none will come, and then a lot'll.
— Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
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 learnt 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's contents are tightly regulated, thanks to bad experiences with manufacturers who crazily experimented with dangerous ingredients like coal tar. Modern ketchup usually contains tomato sauce, vinegar, salt, sugar, onion, garlic and spices like cinnamon, cloves, mace, allspice, nutmeg, ginger and pepper.
Ketchup is so popular because its ingredients hit the five primal tastes of the human tongue: sweet (sugar), salt, sour (vinegar), bitter, and umami — that indefinable addictive flavour present in soy sauce, monosodium glutamate, chicken soup, benzoate and cooked tomato.
A hundred grams of regular tomato ketchup contains around 100 calories. The high amounts of sugar and salt added to ketchup not only bring out its primal flavours but also make it less of a health food than it could have been.
Ketchup is rich in lycopene, an antioxidant found in tomatoes. In fact, ketchup has a higher available 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 it keeps on your plate. French fries, pizza, burgers, samosas, puffs, rolls and other greasy snacks depend on ketchup for a sour edge.
Very few healthful foods incorporate ketchup as a side dish, and ketchup is not very healthful by itself either.
RAJIV M.
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