If you ask someone if pizza is healthy the answer you receive will almost certainly be a hard ‘no’.
Let’s question that belief.
Why is pizza unhealthy? It’s high in protein, contains all three macronutrients, you can put veg on it (and pineapple) to add more micros and fibre. In addition it’s inexpensive to buy, easy to access and requires no cooking wizardry.
Sure there are preservatives and other ingredients with long names in shop bought pizzas, but if these were truly harmful to health they wouldn’t be present in the product. The FSA doesn’t allow poison to go into our food products.
If you make homemade pizza it’s possible to control the ingredient list and macro content to make it more appropriate for your needs. For example, if the saturated fat content is too high in shop bought pizzas for you, then using a lower fat cheese could be more helpful.
I’d be happy to make the argument that as a convenience food pizza is more nutritious than something like a pasta pot, or pot noodle.
Does eating a pizza immediately cause negative health effects? No. Is there any way to measure this? Again, no.
Is it really the pizza or is the diet as a whole that incurs negative health outcomes overtime? More likely the diet as a whole.
If you can find me a study that clearly concludes that eating pizza regularly as part of a predominantly nutrient dense diet causes problems I’d be happy to read it. I don’t think one exists.
It would be almost impossible to run that study accurately and for a long enough period of time for it to be worth doing.
Do I think we should exist purely on a diet of frozen pizza? No.
But I don’t think we should sneer at people for eating it, claim it’s only okay on a ‘cheat day’ or if you’re going to ‘burn it off later’.
Pizza can be a helpful food choice.
It would be hard to claim that eating only pizza would definitely cause health issues also.
The Italians eat a lot of pizza and on average they are slimmer than us Brits and live longer. The average life expectancy in Italy is 82 whereas the United Kingdom is 81. The average BMI in Italy is 26 whereas the United Kingdom is 27.3.
Food for thought.
Stats provided by WHO (2018 & 2015).
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