BRAND-NAME RATING IN SEARCH OF THE BY JAYNE HURLEY & BONNIE LIEBMAN good frozen pizza is hard to find. Plenty of pizzas are good-tasting, but good for you? In most cases, if the can sometimes shrink that to just four ounces). Yet a typical Asaturated fat doesn’t get you, the sodium will. pizza that is advertised “for one” weighs seven ounces. We’ve based our serving sizes on single-serve pizzas. But But things are changing—ever so slowly—in the frozen-pizza instead of using their weight as our standard, we’ve used case. A few brands have cut back on the sat fat and salt with- their diameter. After all, three people are unlikely to split a out turning out a dry, tasteless, they-call-this-pizza? Some pizza that’s no wider than a small dinner plate, even if it even have interesting toppings—like roasted garlic chicken or weighs 15 ounces. Our system: Greek sesame—instead of pepperoni or sausage. Others have For pizzas that are Our serving is 1 10 or more inches wide /3 pizza those great-tasting self-rising crusts that jump-started the 1 8 to 9 inches wide /2 pizza frozen-pizza market a few years ago. less than 8 inches wide whole pizza We didn’t find the perfect pizza. But we can help you find the best of what’s out there. That makes the numbers in our chart higher than the numbers you’ll find on most packages. Even so, our servings Watch Your Servings aren’t large. For example, California Pizza Kitchen—a small chain that When you’re talking pizza, Best Bites are out of the question has spread to the East Coast—assumes that each 10-inch (too much sodium and saturated fat). Our Better Bites had pizza you order at one of its restaurants serves one person. no more than four grams of saturated fat and 600 milligrams Yet the labels on most of the company’s eight-inch frozen of sodium per serving. Those limits are quite generous. pizzas give a serving as a third of a pie. In our chart we’ve They translate into a fifth of a day’s sat fat and a quarter of a listed a serving as half a pie. day’s sodium. Most other pizzas have at least twice as much The bottom line: If you’re not careful, pizza can be a as that. high-sodium, high-sat-fat food. So use our chart, eat a mod- A third of an 11-inch DiGiorno Rising Crust Pepperoni est serving, and round out your meal with soup or a hearty Pizza, for example, has 1,980 mg of sodium and 32 grams of salad, some sautéed vegetables, and, for big eaters, maybe a fat, 14 of them saturated. A third of a DiGiorno Cheese side dish of pasta. Stuffed Crust Pepperoni has 2,140 mg of sodium and 40 grams of fat, 18 of them saturated. Better Bites You won’t find any of those numbers on the package, however. The government lets Nutrition Facts labels use an The best-tasting Better Bites we tried are made by a small unrealistically small serving size: five ounces (and rounding company, A.C. LaRocco of Spokane, Washington. (You may have trouble finding them outside of a health-food store.) The tomatoes in the Tomato & Feta combine sun-dried with fresh. The Garden Vegetarian is loaded with bell pep- pers, broccoli, mushrooms, olives, and other veggies. The Cheese & Garlic is sprinkled with pine nuts and basil. And the Polynesian manages to successfully combine fresh pineapple with feta cheese. Bonus: A.C. LaRocco’s crust has some organic whole wheat mixed in with the organic unbleached white flour. It’s crispy on the outside but like a fresh-baked loaf of bread on the inside. That’s no small potatoes. Whole wheat is nearly impossi- ble to find in the frozen-pizza case. Once you go beyond A.C. LaRocco, your options are less exciting. Healthy Choice makes a handful of decent French Bread Pizzas (Cheese, Pepperoni, Supreme, and Vegetable) Serves how many? According to the labels, the 6-inch Tombstone that are remarkably low in saturated fat—only two grams per Pizza serves one and the 7-inch DiGiorno serves three. While the serving. (French bread pizzas are more of a quick lunch than DiGiorno does weigh more (12.7 ounces) than the Tombstone (6.9 ounces), it sure doesn’t weigh three times as much. Photos: Corbis (top), Nick Waring (bottom). ›››› NUTRITION ACTION HEALTHLETTER ■ JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 13 BRAND-NAME RATING a dinner dish.) And the word “Healthy” in the name keeps the sodium at no more than 600 mg (that’s the govern- ment’s limit for an entrée that makes a “healthy” claim). Lean Cuisine also makes respectable Cheese, Deluxe, and Pepperoni French Bread Pizzas. (The Deluxe just missed our sodium cutoff by 30 mg.) Like Healthy Choice, they don’t come with inspired toppings. But both do a good job with so little fat and sodium. In contrast, Smart Ones Veggie Ultimate Pizza has little sauce and a character-less crust. Best of the Rest We can’t recommend pizzas that exceed our already gener- ous saturated fat and sodium limits. But with so few Better Meaty yet meatless. These new meatless pizzas taste like the real Bites, it’s good to know which of the rest fall at the healthier thing. But half of either one had a bit too much saturated fat for a end of the spectrum...especially when some are real gems. Better Bite, and the Boca had far too much sodium. ■ Freschetta’s 8-inch pizzas are delicious. (The company’s ■ Boca and Morningstar Farms make excellent meat-like 12-inch pizzas are fattier and less interesting.) You won’t pizzas. Their pepperoni and/or sausage taste surprisingly find any tomato sauce on the Roasted Garlic Chicken, but authentic, and the five grams of sat fat per (half-pizza) serving there’s more than enough flavor to go around, and the sat- are half what you’d get in similar real-meat pizzas. But Boca’s urated fat tab is just four grams for half a pizza. Two other sodium tips the scales at about 1,000 mg. And half a Freschettas—the Mozzarella & Fresh Basil and the Southwest Morningstar Farms (which has a low-for-pizza 480 mg of Style Chicken Supreme—also have a straight-from-the- sodium) has only 300 calories, so it may leave you hungry. oven crust and rich, satisfying taste. And their five grams What’s more, the partially hydrogenated oil in Morningstar’s of sat fat (in half a pizza ) aren’t bad. If only the sodium crust could add a gram or so of (artery-clogging) trans fat. weren’t so high (840 mg for half a Garlic Chicken, 870 mg for half a Basil, and 1,120 mg for half a Southwest). Eight- ■ Amy’s Roasted Vegetable No Cheese Pizza has marinated inch Freschettas to watch out for: 4-Cheese, Pepperoni, and sweet onions in place of tomato sauce. If you like the change Supreme. Half of any of them will set you back eight or of pace, you can’t beat the sat fat (two grams in half a pizza). nine grams of sat fat. And you can’t beat the fresh-baked taste and pizzeria crust of Amy’s more traditional pizzas. We couldn’t get enough of ■ California Pizza Kitchen knows how to cook. The the Mushroom & Olive, the Pesto, and the Veggie Combo Portobello Mixed Mushroom Pizza doesn’t skimp on those (each with five grams of sat fat in half a pizza). We also loved fabulous mushrooms, and with just five grams of sat fat the Cheese and the Spinach, but half of either one will cost and 720 mg of sodium, it just barely misses a Better Bite. you six grams of sat fat. That’s getting up there. The only The Thai Recipe Chicken Pizza, with its spicy peanut sauce, dud: Amy’s Soy Cheeze. “Plastic” is the kindest thing you green onions, bean sprouts, and carrots, is as close to could say about the topping. Bangkok as you can get without flying there. Unfortu- nately, its five grams of sat fat are joined by 1,110 mg of ■ Heavens’ Bistro is living proof that fat-free cheese can taste sodium. And those numbers are for half a pizza. Don’t as good as the real thing. And how does zero to three grams even think about the other CPK pizzas—which range from of sat fat per serving grab you? Too bad the sodium ranges seven to 14 grams of sat fat in half a pie. from 1,130 mg to 1,310 mg in half a pie. The information for this article was compiled by Sarah Wade. The Leaning Tower of Pizza Better Bites have no more than four grams of saturated fat and 600 milligrams of sodium per serving. Within each cat- egory, pizzas are ranked from least to most saturated fat, then sodium, then calories. Pizza 1 10 inches or more ( /3 of the pizza unless noted) Calories Total(grams) Fat Saturated(grams) FatSodium(milligrams) ✔ A.C. LaRocco Polynesian* 460 13 3 580 Just missed. These out-of-this-world pizzas missed our sodium cut- 1 Ellio’s Healthy Slices Cheese ( /2 box) 480 8 3 720 off by 120 to 240 milligrams, but they’re lower in sat fat (four or five grams in half a pie) than most pizzas.