Last night, I ordered a pepperoni pizza from Pizza Hut. I put mushrooms, olives, and red onions (raw) on it. My questions:
Are olives and mushrooms vegetables? Would it count as a serving on the FDA nutritional value pyramid? Does putting it on a pizza nullify its health benefits?
When eating health food and junk food together, does one overpower the other, and then the total becomes classified as only one? When? Example: ranch dressing on a salad, lettuce on a burger.
Are all pizzas equal? I have made/seen pizzas that are disgustingly healthy when I worked at Dominoes and California Pizza Kitchen, but pizzas are rarely, if ever, seen as healthy.
The fat and salt in a PH pizza are bad for you, irrespective of what toppings you put on it. It’s not a case where putting extra good things on it somehow cancel out the bad; preserved meats like pepperoni are bad for you no matter what else you eat alongside them. Foods are additive, not subtractive, if you want to view them like colours or light.
All pizzas are not equal; a home-made pizza with fresh healthy ingredients is perfectly fine healthy food, as is a home-made hamburger. Store-bought examples of either are likely to be unhealthy in general, and as you really have no way of knowing what goes into them are best avoided.
A small amount of vegetables doesn’t make something “healthy.” Nor is lettuce particularly healthy. It’s basically water. However, it is a mistake to look at anything as “healthy” or “unhealthy.” Anything in moderation can be a part of a healthy diet. But you need to make sure you are getting a variety of food and not eating too much of it.
Pizza has two problems. The first is that it uses a ton of cheese. Cheese is very high fat and calorie dense. While it can be a part of a healthy diet, a serving of cheese is about the size of two dominos. Almost any pizza you find is going to have a lot more than that. The crust doesn’t help much, either. It’s basically nutritionally void.
The second problem is that we just eat a ton of it. A serving size of pizza is one or maybe two slices. If your pizza has 250 calories a slice, one slice is not going to be a problem. But four probably is. How many people actually eat that little? And if you did eat that little, would you be satisfied until the next meal? Probably not. You probably need food that is less nutritionally dense to fill you up.
So have your pizza, but eat one slice of it with a larger serving of something a bit healthier- maybe a large salad that relies heavily on veggies rather than lettuce. Skip the ranch!
Years ago I recall an intervew that said “Pizza is complex.” Evan nailed the interview.
What I got out of the interview was that a slice was part of a meal.
My Carrot cake at work is made with 2 carrots for 18 large portions. (3"x3"x2" tall). That’s about half of your daily need of vitamin A along with 1/3 cup of cream cheese frosting, and 1/4 cup of sugar in the batter.
We order pizza with either no cheese or very little cheese. With enough toppings, you won’t even notice. Many pizzas in Italy come with no cheese. Order some roasted garlic, onion, olives, whatever, it’s delicious.
My old man used to take me to the Italian grocery store near our house for Italian “pizza.” It was a flat piece of bread, rock hard with a teensy slab of sauce and some sliced zucchini tossed on top.
THAT probably meets the requirement of Health Food more than anything you can eat at Pizza Hut. They spray something to the effect of garlic flavoured Pam to get it out of the pan when its finished baking. That’s what gives it that lovely sheen fresh out of the box!
My wife makes homemade pizza using fresh fat free, low carb, low sodium cheese, and she uses it sparingly (she mixes in just a smidgen of regular to help with the melting process). She makes her own sauce and it’s very low in salt. She also makes her own crust. She tops it with red peppers, onions, tomatoes: All fresh, not canned. No meat. She does sprinkle a little olive oil on it in the middle of baking. It’s about as healthy as your going to get when it comes to pizza.
There are different types of pizza or pizza-like flatbread in different regions of Italy, but all of them have a thinner and crisper crust and fewer toppings tan pretty much anything most Americans will identify as “pizza”. In Italy, pizza is antipasto, or a filler between courses; a single plate-sized serving is brought to the table and shared among the occupants. It would be a stretch to call it health food, as the crust is generally made of refined white flour (and therefore essentially simple carbs) and the sauce is usually some kind of tomato base (also high in sugar), pesto (oil and cheese, so high in fats), or white sauce (fatty dairy), and may have toppings like olives or proscuitto that are high in fats. Even nominally healthy toppings like zucchini, mushrooms, eggplant, et cetera are both so sparse and so thoroughly cooked that their nutritional value is questionable. Some crusts are made of semolina or whole wheat and are marginally healthier, but it still isn’t like eating a vegetable salad.
Pizza Hut “pizza” (and Dominos, and Papa Johns, et cetera) are all both vastly removed from Italian-style pizza and are pretty much a combination of all possible things unhealthy; they’re high in fat (cheese, fatty meats), high in carbs (refined white flour, tomato base with added sugar), has almost no fiber, and is low in satiety (for the volume of calories consumed they don’t seem very filling). The thick crust “Chicago-style” pizzas that are infused with grease to make them crispy are especially unhealthy, but even thin crust pizza isn’t much better. Putting a few healthy toppings on top, as even sven said, doesn’t make it remotely healthy. It’s basically the equivalent of using environmentally-friendly tire cleaner on your Hummer. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a slice or two of delicious, cheesy, greasy goodness sprinkled with red pepper and folded up New York style every once in a while, but don’t be under any illusions that putting a few vegetables on it makes it in any way healthy.
[nitpick]Not entirely true. Pizza al taglio or pizza rustica is quite thick. And quite a lot of Italian pizzas are less crisp than their American counterparts.[/nitpick]
Is white flour considered a simple carb? I thought only sugars were.
Anyhow, I wouldn’t go so far as to say pizza is a health food, but it can be a healthy balanced part of your diet, if you make it yourself. There’s nothing that states pizza has to be a fat and calorie bomb. I make homemade pizzas out of either a giant (10-12") flour tortilla or an Arabic flatbread, that is about 180 calories (when I’m lazy. Otherwise, I make the dough myself, but it tends to be a little more calorie laden, I’d estimate at least twice the calories for the same diameter.) Add tomatoes, some red peppers, onions, garlic, a measured amount of cheese, some lean meat (I’ll cook up some chicken breast or find some lean ham), a very light drizzle of olive oil, and we’re under 500 calories for an entire pizza, with a reasonable balance of protein, carbs, and fat. And if you want to get vegetable heavy, you can easily do so.
Carbohydrates are sugars lying in wait. It’s much more work for your body to convert a slice of 12 grain wheat bread into sugar than a slice of wonderbread which is why complex carbs are so highly touted.
Yes, I know. But aren’t starches still classified as “complex carbohydrates”? I know they used to be, at least. Nutritional labels used to have, IIRC, simple carbs, complex carbs, and dietary fiber. Now, I think they have total carbs, sugars, and dietary fiber.
More specifically, simple carbohydrates break down quickly, which tends to spike blood glucose levels and thus insulin response, which also tends to stimulate fat production (to store the sudden excess of fuel) and play havoc with the body’s natural regulatory homeostatic negative feedback systems. Simple carbs are fine if you are going to go out and run a marathon; they’re not good for the more typical sedentary life of the average person, and their intake should be limited. Complex carbohydrates–in particular, whole grains that also contain a lot of dietary fiber–tend to break down more slowly and produce a more even insulin response that doesn’t stress the body’s response system.
Although “whole wheat” is often considered a complex carb, most products that are advertised as “whole wheat” are still processed and/or combined with refined carbohydrates. True whole grains, like whole oats, unmilled (brown) rice, barley, et cetera are vastly more healthy than both refined white flour or whole wheat flour.
“Starch” is a general term used to refer to linked carbohydrates, and is not indicative of how soluble they are or how readily they break down into simple sugars. The starches in potatoes, for instance, break down very quickly, making these tubers nearly as unhealthy as eating unrefined sugar (save that the bulk of mass of a potato is water). Starches from other sources, like wheat and barley, are more difficult to break down in their unprocessed form, and the presence of dietary fiber further retards their absorption. The glycemic index (GI) of a whole food is really the best way to evaluate it’s tendency to upset the insulin regulatory system. Some foods that are high in sucrose or glucose actually have a lower GI rating than foods with less sugar but also less fiber.
