(KFreon)
One way to cut down on the fat on your next pizza pie while keeping the flavor is to order it with double tomato sauce and light cheese. Just reducing the mozz by one-third saves you 20 g of fat per pie, equal to the amount in a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder.
8 Ways to Cut Fat Without Realizing It [Men's Health via @EatThisNotThat]
More From Consumerist
-
Little Caesar’s Employee Chases Me Down To Give Me Free Pizza
-
Japan’s New “Pepsi Special” Claims It Can Reduce Fat So You Can Eat Crap, Be Skinny
-
Tip Your Pizza Hut Driver Or He Might Pee On Your Door
-
Woman Sues California Pizza Kitchen For $5 Million, Shocked That Frozen Pizzas Could Be Unhealthy
-
Pizza Chain Offers Free Pies If You Order In Spanish
If you’re eating a pizza, it’s because you don’t care about fat. Maybe you’re treating yourself. Maybe it’s a celebratory pizza because friends are over. Maybe it’s just because, but for me, pizza is a rare treat and when I have it, I want it to be the pizza I always remember. That means extra cheese. Diet be damned.
Otherwise I’ll just have a salad.
I like to have pizza to treat myself, but if I would enjoy a pizza with 20g less fat as much as I would if I ordered it the way I normally do, then it’s worth a shot. Sure, you may prefer to keep your rare treat as indulgent as possible, and I don’t blame you. I (and I’m sure a lot of people) try to find ways to cut down calories, fat, sodium, and other crap from both my regular diet and my treats.
I cannot remember the title, but I know this is a really cool book out there that is a guide to choosing healthier options for treats, fast food, etc. For example, an egg McMuffin from McD has 180 calories and 3g of fat less than a Blueberry Muffin from Dunkin Donuts. If I want to treat myself to breakfast, why not choose the lesser of two (delicious) evils?
I actually enjoy pizza mostly for the crust and sauce. That may mean I don’t care about carbs, but I often find that pizzas have way more cheese than I really want. Unfortunately, light cheese isn’t always an option by the slice.
Pizza doesn’t have to be loaded with calories. And many salads have more. I lost a lot of weight on a diet that included pizza.
I like how “Green feminine products” is a related story.
Evidence-based science shows that fat doesn’t cause you to be fat; carbohydrates cause you to be fat. Even Men’s Health had a great article about this sometime last year, I think.
The best people to read on this are Gary Taubes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html
And Dr. Michael Eades: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/
Evidence based science says overeating any type of food causes weight gain. Not just carbs or fat.
All things in moderation.
I lost weight on a high carb, low fat diet, it worked fine. My brother lost weight on a low carb diet, it worked fine. We both gained the weight back and now are losing weight eating less of everything and exercising more.
The difference is high carbs make you hungrier in the long run.
Is there non-evidence based science? I mean, that’s pretty much the entire concept OF science, right – evidence leading to a verifiable, provable theory?
short answer: yes, there is. google lipid hypothesis.
Done. The wiki entry, about a paragraph in: “An accumulation of evidence has led to the acceptance of the lipid hypothesis as scientific fact by the medical community…”
Christian science?
*goes and hides*
I think Amy means empirical research. Think direct observation vs. theoretical physics (which is still science).
I’ve had that exact pizza – it’s called Pizza Hut. They put too much sauce on, and then it tastes overly saucy.
You can save a lot of calories by having pizza without crust either. In fact, just gimme a glass of tomato sauce. Mmmmm, that’s good pizza!
That’s good to know. However, while I’m munching away on my Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Double Meat-Lovers Deluxe Supreme, my waistline is the furthest thing from my mind (and getting further away, I might add).
If I’m concerned about fat and such, I’ll be ordering something other than pizza in the first place.
Ugh, a peeve of mine is pizza drenched in tomato sauce. None of the pizza I’ve ever had in Europe was drenched in sauce, and neither was the pasta. I don’t understand the fascination in the US with covering an entire pizza with huge amounts of sauce. I’m just thankful I’ve found a few pizza places that don’t serve a tomato sauce pizza.
I’m the opposite. I absolutely love lots of sauce on my pizza. Of course, it helps if it’s good sauce and not the crappy sauce I’ve had on lots of pizzas. I also like the crust to be whole wheat, and I like a little less chesse. And lots of veggies, especially onion and green pepper. Umm.
I’ve had pizza before where the pizza sauce was just tomato sauce – no seasoning at all. Ugh.
And I’ve had pizza with just a schmear of sauce – ugh again, at least for me.
Of course, I can’t get pizza the way I like it anywhere but home, and I hate to cook, so I don’t have pizza often.
I don’t like a large VOLUME of sauce, but I like it concentrated and tangy. I.e. I want to taste it, but don’t like it to be watery.
You know that you can just ask for light sauce, right? We over sauce pasta in the US because that is how most people want it (and usually ask for more sauce, anyway). Sometimes I think that most people just need a vehicle (pasta, lettuce, whatever) for all the condiments that are going with whatever they eat…
Have you tried Ledo’s white pizza? If you love garlic, it is soooo gooood.
I for one am completely opposed to veggies on pizza. They don’t belong there. Pizza was made for meat.
Discuss.
I love vegetables on pizza because usually the tomato sauce has a little salt, the dough has a little salt, and the cheese is salty. So all the meat that gets piled on also has salt and it’s all a big sodium-laden monstrosity. I like meat on pizza but I’d rather have one meat and several vegetables or vegetables only.
Now, pineapple is the only non-tomato fruit that is acceptable on a pizza.
I don’t know, I saw a recipe for a pear and gorgonzola pizza that sounded pretty good. I’m pretty experimental with my pizzas, though, just about anything seems to taste good on a pizza.
Sounds like my girlfriend, she’s a little carnivore! How she stays so stick-thin and constantly orders things like pizza with pepperoni, bacon, sausage, and probably something I’m forgetting is completely beyond me. Sooo jealous.
I’m with you to an extent, a meat lovers pizza is a wonderful thing. However, I prefer a good meaty pizza and then adding onions and green pepper to it. Both, IMO, enhance the flavor of the meat and as pecan noted, decrease the saltiness of the meat a little too.
Meat’s good. I love me some pepperoni…but nothing wrong with a little green pepper.
I want twice as much pepperoni and italian sausage and the regular amount of hamburger and canadian bacon, twice as much sauce, a little green pepper and lots of olives, normal amount of cheese.
All I can say is YUCK!
“The Dietary Benefits of Pizza:” A Short Story. A very short story.
But I like cheese….
I’m also kind of grossed out by the advice to refrigerate canned soups so you can scrape the fat off the top.
Yeah, I don’t see how that’s a “Without realizing it” item.
I like the steak fries tip, assuming that it works. I’m also wondering if that trick for low fat cheese works.
If you don’t want fat.. Don’t eat Pizza!
A good way to cut down is to nix the pepperoni and sausage in favor of ham or canadian bacon. Or just put veggies on.
But what we do is get a big garden salad, fill up on that, and then have 1 or 2 slices of pizza on the side. In my younger, idontgiveafuck days, I would polish off a whole 16″ pizza by myself. Now I have two slices and I’m happy.
Dear god, I absolutely loathe sauce and love cheese blends. This sounds like a complete recipe for the most disastrous pizza ever. What next, throw some anchovies on there too?
Screw that, i hate tomatoes. Too much sauce makes it overly messy and taste like you’re just dipping bread in tomato paste.
I can see where you wouldn’t miss a one third reduction in cheese. Also don’t put on the pepperoni and you have something much easier to work into a diet. Have a few pieces, enjoy.
Personally I can’t stand the part-skim-low-moisture cheese many pizza places are using now. It isn’t pizza without a little grease on the top!
A lot of pizza places don’t put enough cheese on there in the first place. Back home, extra cheese meant extra cheese but where I live now extra cheese means nothing. It’s the same as regular cheese which means parts where there’s no cheese covering the pizza.
You have to get a cheese lover’s pizza to get enough.
That said – I disagree that this isn’t useful advice. Just because a pizza isn’t healthy doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t reduce the amount of damage it does. That’s like saying that if you have a small amount of ice-cream at the end of the week that you shouldn’t eat low sugar or low fat ice cream.
Light cheese is all they give you anyway. Ask for “light cheese” and you might not get ANY.
You’d think cheese cost as much per pound as fucking saffron around here.
Cheese is the most expensive part of the pizza, which is why you never seem to get enough
That is to say, the easiest way for a pizza restaurant to make more money is to cut back the cheese
That advice is pathetic. You should strive to increase the quality of the food you eat; make the food appealing and special. Savor it. Don’t turn it into cardboard!
Order a pizza with all the toppings you love — veggies and meats, and yes, even fruits. That way you get a diversity of nutrients along with your tasty carbs and fat. Even assuming the toppings are standard bulk supplies in jars and cans, a pie with the works has far more nutrition than a plain pie, calorie for calorie.
After reading through all the comments, I am so craving cheese right now.
that will also double the hearburn!! Light sauce… light sauce!!!
Ugh! I have spit out sauce on pizza when they use too much. I like a light amount of sauce, and a nice covering of cheese. My girlfriend loves sauce, she is from the Chicago area and I am from the East Coast. We always end up with either one of us loving and the other hating or both of us thinking the pizza is just OK. If I wanted a lot of sauce, I would have ordered pasta not pizza.
I have tried to order pizzas with extra tomato sauce, and I honestly don’t think a regular chain (Papa John’s, Domino’s, et al.) ever actually does this. I would expect a more expensive local place to try, at least.
Pizza isn’t for people trying to eat healthy. It’s just because you want to eat it.
Umm, then I have tomato on bread with cheese flavoring. No thanks.
Gross. Like others said, if you’re worried about fat, don’t eat freaking pizza.
The trick is to know your pizza and decide how much/little cheese you can get away with. I’ve settled on two different pizza places (one expensive artisan-style; one mid-price new york style), and I know that I actually prefer light cheese on the new york pizza.
I do recall that, many years ago, I tried ordering light cheese from pizza hut and I got a gross mostly-sauce abomination.
Believe me, if I swap cheese for tomato sauce I’m gonna ‘realize’ it. Which is why I’d never do it. Yuck!
If you want to cut calories either don’t eat pizza with heavy cheese or eat less of it and drink more water with your meal.
If I wanted that, I would just dip bread in a jar of spaghetti sauce. Ew.
How about blotting the pizza? I’ve always done this and people laughed, and then someone did a study and backed me up. *of course* it’s going to reduce the fat, you can see the fat on/in the paper towel now. It’s not all of it, or a lot of it, but it’s fat that didn’t add any flavour or enjoyment anyway.
You don’t have to ask for light cheese at pizza hut, they give it to you without asking
Papa Murphy’s take-and-bake has the best pizza ever. It’s cheap because you bake it yourself (they just put it together) and of course, you can tweak the toppings. They have a mix of onions that is just delicious. Of course, you can leave off so much cheese if you like but I like more.
Me and BF got one last night: pepperoni, the onion mix, tomatoes and extra cheese. My lunchbox is happy today and soon so will be my tummy.
I HATE the “Eat this not that” concept; it’s making people think that it’s ok to eat shit, as long as it’s not the worst shit. Adding extra sauce to your pizza won’t do squat because it’s loaded with sugar. I did like the fruit juice suggestion. My mom always diluted our juice to stretch it longer, so now I do it because it tastes too strong without the water.