O’ Canada, we send our praise to thee.

You gotta love those Canucks! Besides inventing Pablum and insulin and hockey, they’ve now come up with a pioneering study that proves pasta is not fattening. Game on!

That’s right. Eat all the pasta you want.* It won’t make you blimp up.

Medical researchers at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital have released a new study that clears the bad name of pasta as a flab villain.

“Contrary to concerns,” wrote the study’s lead author John Sievenpiper, “perhaps pasta can be part of a healthy diet.”

Well, never mind the “perhaps,” that’s good enough for some of us. Let’s eat! However, in case you want more:

“Carbohydrate staples such as pasta have been implicated in the obesity epidemic,” the study ominously posits in the medical journal BMJ Open. So the researchers set out to assemble and analyze a vast amount of existing controlled randomized trials.

They pored over 30 other controlled tests involving some 2,500 subjects who ate pasta two or three times a week instead of other carbohydrates in a healthy low-glycemic index diet. The concerns, of course, are lowering the risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes as well as reduction in weight and blood sugar levels.

“In weighing the evidence,” Sievenpiper added, “we can now say with some confidence that pasta does not have an adverse effect on body weight outcomes when it is consumed as part of a healthy dietary pattern.”

They also said their findings do not grant permission* to some of us — you know who I am — to gorge on pasta bathed in cheese and other condiments like meat and sauces. Yeh, right. Yada-yada.

Excuse me, waitress?