Before you take a bite of pizza, think about what you want to eat and the addiction that often follows. We have heard people ask, is pizza healthy? Apparently that same question in your mind brought you here.
We will look at the ingredients and whether pizza is healthy for everyone to eat.
Pizza is a savoury dish first enjoyed in Italy, but it has become popular all over the world.
However, as the popularity grows, quite a lot happens to the original recipe. This twist of recipe now makes it necessary for this article. It is like opening your eyes to some things.
Ingredients In Pizza
This snack typically consists of a circular base of dough that is topped with tomato sauce, cheese, and various toppings of your choice.
However, ingredients for pizza can vary depending on the type of pizza you want to make.
If you are part of people asking: Is pizza healthy?, there are few things that you must know.
You see, the ingredients determine how healthy your pizza is.
This depends on the type of crust, the toppings and amount of cheese in your pizza.
If you make your pizza at home, you have control over the amount of these ingredients that you add.
But if you buy your pizza from a shop, this are the likely ingredients.
- Pizza dough (can be homemade or store-bought)
- Pizza sauce (can be tomato-based or other types of sauce)
- Cheese (usually mozzarella, but other types such as parmesan, cheddar, or feta can also be used)
- Toppings (such as pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, onions, peppers, olives, tomatoes, etc.)
Optional ingredients that can add more flavor to your pizza include: Herbs and spices (such as oregano, basil, garlic, or red pepper flakes). Others are Olive oil, Parmesan cheese, Meatballs, Pineapple (for a Hawaiian-style pizza) and Anchovies.
Basically, the last set, depends on the makers’ decision and cost control.
Keeping You Coming
Indeed, there is something we know about the taste buds. Once they get used to a thing, the desire to have that thing begins to reduce.
In economics, experts call it law of diminishing utility.
As a result of this law, people who make pizza know your taste buds are like that. However, they want to keep you coming.
So, where there is no proper regulation or where regulation is predictable, they manipulate the recipe.
This manipulation is what makes pizza absolutely tilted towards an unhealthy meal.
Presence Of Salt
Also, the one you will call healthy, not made in your home, contains a good amount of sodium from the tomato sauce and cheese.
Based on this, persons who are having issues with salt intake and even heart diseases should apply caution.
If you will take just a pie and walk away, you could manage to have pizza once in a while. But if a pie is not enough for you, you may just be loading your body with unwanted amount of salt.
Calcium In Pizza
Also, when you ask people; is pizza healthy? those who believe they know the ingredients so well claim it offers you calcium. They appropriate this to the presence of cheese and lycopene from tomatoes in the mix.
Well, those are few of the benefits from pizza, but whether this benefit outweighs the downside is another thing.
Whole Grain In Pizza
Indeed, when this snack has whole-wheat flour as its base, it is healthier than the regular white crust. However, that wheat base is not for everyone.
There are persons who have gluten intolerance and that wheat will give them trouble.
Also, whole grain wheat comes with fiber that is great for your digestive system (1).
Bottom Line
For this reason, consider what is in the pizza you are about to order.
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Most of the ingredients in pizza are processed and they have preservatives that may not even react well when placed under heat.
Again, the ingredients play a great role when it comes to answering the question: Is pizza healthy?
For instance, toppings such pepperoni, sausage and extra cheese can increase the amount of saturated fat, sodium and calories you get.
On the flip side, slices made with thinner crusts and topped with veggies have lower calorie, saturated fat and sodium counts. Yet they are still pizza.
This is why making pizza at home is often better.
Your large size of pizza from a shop could contain as much as 480 calories, 10 grams of saturated fat and 1,180 milligrams of sodium.
For this to be healthy for you, it depends on how active you are to burn the calories and others out of your system.
It is not totally a bad thing to have pizza, but if you are concerned about your health, you should make sure that you know what is in the pizza you are eating.
You should know that when an individual comes down with illness, everyone around shares from it – either financially or emotionally.