Health and Pizza

Originally Italian– the Pizza has captured our hearts and palettes like never before. The Italian recipe is a simple round shaped baked bread topped with fresh vegetables and meat and sprinkled with shredded cheese. Tomato sauce liberally poured on it makes it absolutely yummy and hard to resist. This simple food now has hundreds of variations to suit the tastes of people world wide. This wholesome, tasty morsel is simple to prepare, even simpler to order and helps in saving precious time if not the contents of your wallet.

But is it really as healthy as it looks? Let’s find out.

Traditional: The home cooked Pizza is very different from the popular fast food that is commercially available at every nook and corner nowadays. A very low fat content cheese called the Feta cheese is used in home made Pizzas together with fresh vitamin rich vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms and spinach. The traditional Pizza in Italy also contains olive oil and helpful fiber making it a very healthy food indeed.

Commercial Variety: The commercial Pizza on the other hand has high salt and fat content and can create dietary complications for people who literally live on such meals. The salt present in such Pizzas has been found to be more than double the amount needed for an average adult. The takeaways of USA and UK also try to lure people by piling on the high fat cheeses, fatty meats and yeast on to their products. As a result the colorie content shoots up leading to obesity which in itself is a risk factor for cancer and other fatal diseases.

Research: Inspite of the health problems, studies in Europe have thrown up certain startling facts. It was seen that people who had Pizza often had a lower chance of developing cancer. Doctors and researchers think this is probably due to the presence of lycopene, an antioxidant present in tomatoes that can grant us protection against cancer.

The debate rages on. In the meantime you can continue to enjoy your favourite variety of Pizza in moderation and still remain healthy.