Article

Pizza — good for what ails ya' ... if you eat it in Italy

The annual Harvard 'Ig Nobels' are out and pizza is in, as long as it's pizza in Italy.

Photo: iStock

September 25, 2019 by S.A. Whitehead — Food Editor, Net World Media Group

As a reader of this website, we're fairly sure that you're on board with the notion that pizza is pretty fabulous stuff. Now though, the highly esteemed Harvard University has given the pie its due. 

Seems the elite New England school this year has joined with science humor rag, "Annals of Improbable Research" to award Italian Lifestyle Epidemiology Lab chief, Silvao Gallus, one of 10 annual Ig Nobel Prizes this year for his research that found pizza can prevent all kinds of deadly digestive diseases ... but only if made and eaten in Italy. 

The Ig Nobles, of course, are those annual dubious honors for research and "achievements that make people laugh, then think." The Harvard Crimson reported that Gallus led three studies into the health benefits of eating pizza and concluded that pizza could protect those who partake from many chronic diet-related diseases or as as the research itself concluded, that "pizza might protect against illness and death, if the pizza is made and eaten in Italy."

True Nobel Laureates like economist Eric S. Maskin and physicist Jerome I. Friedman handed out this year's awards for the unconventional research, which the Crimson said came with 10 trillion worthless Zimbabwean dollars. Gallus leads the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri's lab. 

Finally, it should be noted that apparently there's not a ton of respect for Ig Noble winners, since this year when Gallus was accepting his award, a little girl dressed like a ballerina in the audience shouted, "Please stop! I'm bored." 

About S.A. Whitehead

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Pizza Marketplace and QSRweb editor Shelly Whitehead is a former newspaper and TV reporter with an affinity for telling stories about the people and innovative thinking behind great brands.