You can take our pasta and potatoes and other diet no-nos, but don't touch the pizza.
By JANET K. KEELER
Published June 9, 2004
[Times photo: Patty Yablonski]
[AP photo]
Gennaro Bruno prepares pizzas in a restaurant in Naples, Italy, where there are strict guidelines to protect the real Neapolitan pizza from bogus copies.
This is not a story about where to buy the best pizza in Tampa Bay or what city up North can claim the Best Slice in the World. We do not have the guts to get in the middle of a Chicago vs. New York (or points north, south, east or west) argument about crust, cheese, sauce and shape.
This is a story about how much we love pizza and how, it seems, no diet trend can keep us from it. We might swear off it for a while, but we come back when the gnawing desire for a mushroom-and-olive slice overwhelms us.
Even though Americans are eating 40 percent less bread this year than they did last, we are, it appears, enjoying more pizza. Sales of refrigerated and frozen pizzas are up, after a three-year decline, according to ACNielsen figures. Pizza Hut, the country's largest chain, is reporting a 10 percent increase in sales at corporate-owned stores.
"The reason it is surviving is because it tastes great," says Phil Lempert, a food trend analyst for the Today show and ACNielsen. "Pizza is our No. 1 snack food. It's fun to eat."
Americans spend about $26-billion on 3-billion pizzas annually. That's about 46 slices per person.
Rice, potatoes and bread must be awfully jealous. The nation's 10-million carb-counters have put a hurt on them, so much so that the National Potato Board has launched a $4.5-million campaign to convince folks that the potato is healthy.
Oh, yes, there have been attempts to change the basic structure of the pizza, but not all of them have made it more healthful. Take, for example, Pizza Hut's stuffed-crust pizza "with a ring of delicious cheese baked right into the crust." Available in large only with an additional 150 calories a slice for plain cheese.
The low-fat craze brought us pizza with no cheese or meat, mostly veggies and sauce. A low-carb version is a bit more problematic because crust, with its accompanying carbohydrates, is the essence of pizza. But, of course, people are trying. The strangest attempt yet is a California pizzeria's "pizza in a bucket." That would be all the fixings in a bowl but no crust to pile it on.
Original pizza
In the beginning, pizza wasn't that bad.
Flattened scraps of leftover bread dough were dappled with crushed tomatoes, oregano and garlic, maybe a little olive oil or some torn basil leaves, and baked in a wood-burning oven. Other versions had a sprinkling of mozzarella cheese.
No meat lover's special or pineapple and ham. And no grease dripping down your arm when you pushed a piece into your mouth. Three slices of hand-tossed Domino's cheese pizza has 516 calories, 14 grams of fat and and more than 60 grams of carbs.
"Pizza is basically a poor people's food made of leftover dough and tomatoes. Just something to munch on," says Marcelo Rafaniello, manager of Gennaro's Pizza at Pass-a-Grille on the southern tip of Pinellas County. Rafaniello was raised in Argentina but he, like pizza, was born in Naples, Italy.
Neopolitan bakers are still making pizza simply, but controversy has found its way there, too.
Last month, the Italian Agriculture Ministry approved strict rules about what constitutes a real pizza, specifying the type of flour, yeast, tomatoes and oil to be used. The dough must be rolled manually and baked in wood-burning ovens. Real pizzas can be no more than 14 inches around and no thicker than 0.1 inch in the middle and 0.8 at the edge.
The regulations are part of an effort to protect Italian cuisine as the European Union spreads homogenization across the continent. The ministry will only recognize three types of Neopolitan pizza: marinara with garlic and oregano; margherita with basil and mozzarella cheese from the southern Appennines; extra-margherita with fresh tomatoes, basil and buffalo mozzarella from Campania. No discussion about low-carb pizza by the ministry, and it's not something Gennaro's will be putting on the menu soon.
"I don't like to mess with the recipe," Rafaniello says. "I'd rather do other things (to make it more healthful) like less cheese or no pepperoni."
Besides, the more toppings, especially oily cheese, heaped on a pizza, the soggier the crust becomes. A floppy crust isn't high on anyone's wish list.
"The trick with dieting is to eat the right amount," he says. "But as soon as we find things we like, we abuse them."
The old folks in Naples didn't diet, they ate pizza and they weren't fat, Rafaniello says.
Wait and see
The nation's three largest pizza chains, Pizza Hut, Domino's and Papa John's, have been watching the low-carb trend but are not jumping on the bandwagon, says Steve Coomes, editor of the online trade publication Pizzamarketplace.com.
"We're several years into the trend, and it seems to be waning," Coomes says.
Coomes says that independent pizzerias have had good response to low-carb offerings which have "gotten some dieters off the sidelines."
"But that doesn't appear to have generated new customers or new sales," he says.
Crusts made of whole wheat or soy flours can bring down carbs, he says, but the big chains are content in directing low-carb dieters to their thin-crust pizzas. Pizza Hut's new Four-for-All, four square pizzas with differing toppings in one box, has been a success, Coomes says, and is partly responsible for the chain's sales increase.
"They've done nothing on a national level to promote their Fit 'N Delicious pizza," he says. In fact, the double-sauce, less-cheese pizza is not even listed on the company's Web site.
Atkins Nutritionals, namesake of the diet that kick-started the craze, has personal pepperoni pizzas among its food offerings, each with 22 grams of carbohydrates, 25 fat grams and 440 calories. A similar size Tombstone version has 560 calories, 41 carb grams and 32 fat grams.
(For dieters who've tasted Weight Watchers frozen pizzas or other reduced-calorie offerings, the Atkins offering is about the same. It's spicier than most, and the cheese and pepperoni are tasty. The crust is somewhat spongy.)
Atkins touts its pizza as 11 net grams of carbs, which is the fiber grams (11) subtracted from total carbohydrates (22). The Food and Drug Administration has allowed this number game on food labeling but that may change soon, analyst Lempert says.
The FDA has promised to rule this summer on what can be called "low-carb" and Lempert says it is expected that a serving will have to be 9 grams or less to be labeled as such. In addition, he says, the FDA will not likely allow the subtraction of fiber or sugar alcohols to bring down the carb count.
When that happens, he says, consumers can expect a lot of changes on the labels of what is now being called reduced-carb food.
Pizza lovers, though, have nothing to worry about.
"Pizza as we know it is what's on the horizon," Coomes says.
- Information from Times wires was used in this report. Janet K. Keeler can be reached at 727 893-8586 or krieta@sptimes.com
