Who Knew?

      Always eager to try a new recipe I recently came across one that was simply entitled BLTW Salad.  You probably surmised that the first three letters stand for the traditional bacon, lettuce and tomato ingredients in a favorite sandwich.  If you thought that, you are correct.  But what about the W?
   
     It turns out that the final ingredient for this easy to prepare summer salad is watermelon.  It wasn't difficult to fry up some hickory smoked bacon, cut up some rinsed Romaine lettuce and coarsely dice a ripe beef steak tomato and then cube up a large wedge of watermelon while a home made black pepper and parmesan dressing was cooling in the "chill chest" as Alton Brown refers to it.  Certainly a healthy and satisfying meal for a warm evening.  But I didn't realize just how healthy it was with the addition of the watermelon until I did some research.  Here's my findings:

     The watermelon, Citrullus lamatus, is only distantly related to other melons and is actually the fruit of an African vine, originally very bitter in taste.  It has been eaten by the Egyptians for 5,000 years and also enjoyed by the Greeks since the 4th Century B.C.E.  According to the reference book "On Food and Cooking" the world production of the watermelon is double the production of all other melons combined.  The seedless variety, first cultivated in Japan in the 1930s, really contains undeveloped small white seeds rather than the larger dark "spitters" that we all remember from the days of our youth.  Watermelons are mostly eaten fresh but some choose to also pickle and candy the rind and also use it to make into sweet and sour preserves.

     But now to the healthy part...  According to the National Watermelon Promotion Board (yes, there is such an organization.  Just click on to it for a link and further information.), watermelon should be an important part of a healthy diet.  It contains excellent levels of Vitamin A, C and B6 and is also a source of potassium, phosphorus, and magnesium.  But best of all it has the highest level of lycopene of any fruit or vegetable, even ahead of the tomato!  A 2 cup serving will provide 15-20 mg of this vital cancer-fighting phytonutrient.

     And there's yet another advantage to consuming watermelon, according to research performed at Texas A & M University.  It contains citrulline, which has the beneficial function of relaxing blood vessels in much the same way as Viagra does, but without any of the deleterious side effects.  Wow!  Watermelon has a Viagra effect!  I wonder if that fact will lead to a rise in sales?