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Pizza alone accounts for a large fraction of junk food consumption. I was shocked to learn that more than one in five kids and teens eats pizza on any given da

• baal80spam 5y ago
  Curious - what makes pizza a junk food?
  • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > what makes pizza a junk food? Most pizza in America has sugar in the sauce and dough. The sauce, moreover, tends to be fatty. And the toppings are processed meats, et cetera. If the pizza is prepared in anything but a pizza oven, it's likely also pan fried.
    • tootie 5y ago
      Fruit has a lot of sugar too.
      • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > Fruit has a lot of sugar too It does. We are not fruit bats. Eating a diet of just fruit is not healthy. But the fructose in fruits is digested and absorbed differently from the free sugar in processed foods.
        • olau 5y ago
          I once looked up what big apes are eating and found out that they eat very little meat and lots of fruit. Like half of the diet could be figs.
      • aynyc 5y ago
        Eating fruit vs drinking fruit juice is completely different in terms of amount of sugar ingested.
        • RussianCow 5y ago
          And more importantly, in the amount of fiber ingested.
          • aynyc 5y ago
            Yes, absolutely.
      • pengaru 5y ago
        Intact fruit tends to be high in soluble dietary fiber, which binds up a bunch of the sugar in a goop that passes through the small intestine to be consumed by micros in the large intestine. i.e. it makes you fart when you eat enough of it.
      • short_sells_poo 5y ago
        Yes but it also tends to have lots of fiber, unless again it has been engineered to have as little as possible with maximum sugar content. And the usual advice of "everything in moderation" applies to fruit as well. You can certainly eat unhealthy amount of sugar via fruit, but it is much more difficult than via junk food. 100 grams of donuts contains 50 grams of refined sugar. That's close to half a kg of apples (nearly a pound in freedom units). You could certainly eat that many apples, but then you are also eating a lot of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and fiber. And once you ate half a kg of apples, you are literally stuffed.
  • nate_meurer 5y ago
    The phrases junk food and ultra-processed are somewhat vague, but are generally applied to foods consisting of highly refined carbs, sugars, fat. Very high sodium is ubiquitous as well. Add in some processed meat, and that's literally the entire ingredient list of a pepperoni pizza.
• sosuke 5y ago
  Is there a way to make pizza that wouldn't be considered junk food? Bread, cheese, tomato sauce. I am hoping that the "junk food" of pizza is because of the stuff added for longer shelf lives or added ... something. Frozen pizza should be the same as bread, cheese and tomato sauce. But I'm guessing it isn't the same.
  • ant6n 5y ago
    You can make pizza from scratch. It's an oily dough (I think it can be done with yeast), with sauce and toppings. Sauce can be mostly canned tomatoes, which doesn't have sugar.
    • elil17 5y ago
      The dough isn’t necessarily oily, that depends on the texture you’re going for. It’s almost always yeasted though.
      • CarelessExpert 5y ago
        Absolutely. My go-to thin crust pizza dough is just a high hydration, lean baguette dough that's proofed overnight in the fridge. Just unbleached flour, salt, yeast, and water.
        • nate_meurer 5y ago
          How do you roll your dough out?
          • CarelessExpert 5y ago
            I hand stretch it and bake it at 550F on parchment (which stays under the pizza long enough to set the bottom but not so long it lights on fire...). The pros use a peel and corn meal but I'm too lazy for all that... ;) Because the dough is high hydration and proofs gently overnight, it comes out super relaxed and stretchy, so no roller is needed.