Pizza May Help You Live Longer... But There's a Catch

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We're counting down the arrival of this year's toga-themed 2019 Beijing Pizza Festival – Oct 19-20 at Galaxy Soho – with a mixture of weird, useful, and mouthwatering pizza-related news and reviews from around the world.

It's not every day that you hear good news, so when we heard that a scientist had discovered that eating pizza might not only protect against illness but also death, we almost choked... on our pizza. Sadly, there's just one, major catch to this incredible slice of positive news: the pizza has to be prepared and eaten in Italy.

The studies, which spanned 2003 to 2006 and were undertaken by scientist Silvano Gallus, only took into consideration pizza consumption in Italy. Gallus found that eating cooked tomatoes (and especially tomato sauce), which are rich in the antioxidant lycopene, as well as other staples of the Mediterranean diet like olive oil, is inversely associated to the risk of various cancers, including those of the breast, ovary, and prostate. Mamma mia!

Italian scientist Silvano Gallus collects his prize at the Ig Nobel Prizes on Sep 12

The improbable discovery made headlines last week when Gallus was awarded the top prize in the medicine category of the Ig Nobel Prizes, Harvard's answer to the Nobel Prize. Although the Ig prizes are intended to be a spoof of the real deal, many participating scientists and onlookers consider the research presented each year to be equally as robust, albeit rather goofy.

"The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology," says the official Ig Nobel description.

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Other winners in the 29th Ig Nobel Prize, held on Sep 12, included a team who measured the total saliva volume produced per day by a typical five-year-old child; a team who studied how, and why, wombats make cube-shaped poo; and a (very brave) team who measured the scrotal temperature difference between naked and clothed postmen in France.

All of this year's Ig Nobel winners can be seen at www.improbable.com.

With any luck, there'll be some pizza to help elongate our lives at this year's Pizza Fest, although we fear that in the quantities we'll be eating it we're more likely to need a bulldozer and an oxygen mask to even make it to bed. Want to join us? Get your tickets via the QR code.

Images: Thrillist, avvenire.it

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