Science May Have Just Created a Healthy, Tasty Pizza Safe to Eat Three Times a Day
The topic of ‘pizza as every meal of the day’ was a discussion I was just having with my buddies all of yesterday afternoon. Imagine it: delicious crust, awesome sauce, quality toppings…if you’re anything like me, you’d love to eat it for every meal of the day.
The only thing holding me back from having pizza three times a day, and Bagel Bites as snacks in between, is the fear of my doctor telling me I have the internal body of an eighty year old at my yearly physical, just shy of being a 25-year-old.
But now, we might be on the verge of a catastrophic shift in the pizza eating universe — a Scottish scientist has created what he claims is the first nutritionally balanced pizza. That’s right, a pizza that’s OK to eat three times a day, every day.
Hungry yet? The pizza was developed by a man ironically named Mike Lean, a scientist out of Glasgow University, UK. He claims that the pizza contains 30 percent of an adult’s guideline amount of vitamins and minerals along with a third of the recommended amount of calories, protein and carbohydrates.
Great, so a pizza that’s healthy for you, what’s new? Does it taste good? Anyone can make a pizza on some rice cakes, slather it with organic ketchup and some turkey and call it healthy.
Apparently this wasn’t the case this time around. Lean tells BBC News that the idea for this nutritional pizza was born out of frustration with the products and meals sold by the top five supermarkets in Scotland. According to Professor Lean, the common foods that are eaten in huge numbers are “hopelessly unbalanced.”
He continues, about the products available in supermarkets:
They contain as much salt as you should have in a whole day or more. They contain as much saturated fat as you should have in a whole day or more. The nutrients we need every day are absent from these meals. Nobody has thought about it.
This is where his pizza is different. After a study of the market, he found that seaweed was “an interesting new ingredient being used in artisan bread.” The seaweed resultantly was a way of reducing the salt level in the pizza. He remarks that the flavor is excellent, and the sodium content of seaweed is about 3.5% compared to the 40% in salt. Also noteworthy, “There’s iodine in there, vitamin B12, all sorts of things.”
All-in-all, these new ‘nutritional pizzas’ feature extra magnesium, potassium, folates, vitamin A and extra red pepper in the tomato sauce for a boost of vitamin C. This all equates to each pizza containing the exact proportions of calories, proteins, fat, carbs and nutrients to get 30 percent of your recommended daily intake.
Lean told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that this pizza could be eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner with not a single negative health effect. He also mentioned, on the same program, that 100 taste testers said it was as good or better than other frozen pizzas available on the market.
The team behind the pizza is already in talks with supermarket chains and suppliers to begin stocking the healthy pizzas by later this year.
