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Texas ISD School Guide
Texas ISD School Guide







Short Stories for Teachers

Which frozen pizza tastes the best?
By:Mairlyn Smith

So here is the deal: plain cheese pizza may be a healthier choice, but it's boring.

I've never bought a frozen pizza in my life, but I see them in grocery carts all the time. I felt that as a foodie I should check out what I was missing. As a home economist, I felt an overwhelming desire to separate the healthy choices from the not so healthy choices.

Armed with my clipboard and a pen, I made my way over to three different large grocery store chains in the Greater Toronto Area to check out a variety of pizzas for their nutrient breakdowns. I separated the winners from the losers and took the winners home for a taste test.

As I checked out label after label from a health standpoint, the sodium, grams of saturated fat, and calories were not even close to the good-for-you category.

Most of us only need 1800-2000 calories a day and 55 g to 65 g of total fat per day. Ideally you want a main course to have 500-600 calories and no more than 500-600 mg sodium.

I hung in there, and after reading reams of nutrient breakdowns, the only type of pizza that fit into the sort-of-good-for-you category was a basic cheese pizza, no salami, no pepperoni, no grilled chicken, no extra gooey cheese sauce, and no other extra fatty, sodium-dense garnishes.

I should have taken a calculator with me, because every suggested individual serving size of every basic cheese pizza was a different weight, making it hard to compare one brand to another. Some pizza packages promised you 1/4 of the entire pizza, but that portion only weighed 79 g. The biggest promise, weighed in at 128 g per suggested portion and big surprise, it had the most calories.

After a couple of hours in grocery stores I went home with seven different brands of plain old cheese pizza.

My son and my husband were both pumped at the prospect of eating seven pizzas.

The night I was testing, all of my regulars took a pass. Yes, there were only three of us for this taste testing, but we represented three totally different points of view.

I had already narrowed it to seven based on health, so the only thing we were testing for was flavour.

I fired up my oven and we sampled:

Toscana Gourmet Pizza: 1/3 pizza (110 g) = 270 calories, 10 g total fat, 6 g saturated fat. 830 mg sodium

Dr. Oetker Casa di Mama: 1/4 pizza (100 g) = 210 calories, 8 g total fat, 6 g saturated fat, 650 mg sodium

OrganiCuisine: 1/4 pizza (79 g) = 180 calories, 7 g total fat, 3.5 g saturated fat, 520 mg sodium

President's Choice: 1/4 pizza (103 g) = 270 calories, 9 g total fat, 3.5 g saturated fat, 710 mg sodium

Amy's: 1/3 pizza (123 g) = 310 calories, 12 g total fat, 4 grams saturated fat, 590 mg sodium

Irrestistibles: 1/4 pizza (113 g) = 280 calories, 10 g total fat, 5 g saturated fat, 590 mg sodium

McCain rising crust: 1/6 pizza (128 g) = 290 calories, 9 g total fat, 4.5 g saturated fat, 540 g sodium

We ate, we graded, and we ate some more.

The excitement of testing pizza quickly went down the drain, as pizza after pizza failed to impress any of us.

The frozen pizzas weren't that good. The average score was 5/10.

The lowest grade was given by my son: a 2/10 for Organicuisine (I gave it a 5/10)

The hands down winner of the evening was Amy's Cheese Pizza that I bought at my Metro grocery store in their frozen Health Food Section. It got an 7/10 from all of us.

We were so disappointed with the evening, that the next day we ordered a thin crust whole grain cheese pizza from Pizza Pizza to see if it was the frozen part of the pizza that wasn't good. It got a 5/10, too.

Pizza is really all about the toppings, which unfortunately add extra calories, fat, and sodium. A single slice of a pizza with the works can be as much as 700 calories, for one crummy slice.

So here are my three suggestions:

1. Chop up some green, red or orange peppers, sliced onions, and broccoli to add to the top of any frozen plain cheese pizza. Sprinkle with hot peppers or dried oregano or basil leaves and bake as per the package. At least you're adding some flavour and some nutrition.

2. Order a thin crust whole grain pizza with the toppings you want, once a month as a very special treat, limit yourself to one or two slices, and enjoy it, slowly. And please, skip the pop, the pizza is bad enough for you.

3. For the foodies in the crowd, make your own vegetarian pizza from scratch on a whole grain crust, tons of veggies, and low in the cheese department.






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