Can Pizza Be Good for You?

One of the biggest problems in our country according to a country wide census is our growing obesity problem. This is almost directly because of our surplus of convenient and unhealthy foods that we eat every single day. One of America's favorite dishes, pizza, is one of the foods Americans claim as their "weakness food", meaning that even when they attempt to diet, they still consume the regular amount of greasy, globby, artery clogging pizza.

There's a light of hope for us pizza lovers that are trying to watch our weight, though. As everyone knows, organic foods tend to be far better for the body. If you make a pizza using organic ingredients, healthy cooking techniques, and dough that isn't empty carbs stuffed with greasy cheese, you can make yourself one healthy, and very delicious pizza!

Wheat dough or dough made with a combination of healthy grains has become very popular, especially in new fusion pizza restaurants that have been popping up in America's biggest cities. The dough is hearty and tasty, and doesn't have those empty carbs and calories that white flour dough is full of. Many new organic pizza restaurants use a process called "thinning" for their cheese, which means they use the purest, most unaltered cheese they can find.(for mozzarella, it's usually mozzarella di bufala.) They put it in a sieve and press it with a wooden or bamboo presser, squeezing out some of the liquid and other compounds that would later become grease when put on top of the pizza.

Another wonderful fact about most new organic pizza parlors, is that their sauce is made almost entirely out of diced tomatoes and water, with a tiny bit of olive oil and spices. This lets you taste the actual tomatoes, instead of all that other stuff that's used as filler in the bigger pizza chains. As for toppings, most of the new restaurants for organic pizza stick to the veggie and meat basics, and as you might have already known, the vegetables are all organically grown and the animals have been organically fed. You'll find sorted pepperoni (pepperoni that has been mechanically sorted to remove the chunks of fat), lean ham, chicken, black olives, peppers, onions, and mushrooms. I've also noticed that they like to throw some fruits into the mix, other than the already strange addition of pineapple.

If you want to keep your organic pizza experience as healthy as it can be, use your best judgment and choose toppings that leave little behind other than it's own natural taste.

Sources:
(A 2002 CNN study linking PIZZA to OBESITY.)
(Article from nature.com)