U.S. kids may eat too much pizza

U.S. kids may eat too much pizza


Pizza is one of the all-time great fun-time foods for kids, but “all the time” is not when they should eat it.

The average slice of pizza from a supermarket or a pizzeria has an abundance of sodium, sugar and fat, nutrients that many American kids consume recklessly.

A study published in the journal Pediatrics investigated how pizza consumption might affect young people’s diets, and the results are enough to make parents cry “mamma mia!”

Data for the study came from National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys conducted between 2003 and 2010. The surveys were given to young people ages 2 to 19. About 12,000 surveys were completed, sometimes with parental help.

Each survey included two items asking recipients to make a list with everything they remembered eating in the past twenty-four hours. The first list was made a few days before the second.

When pizza was mentioned, recipients were asked about the source, toppings, quantity, and time of day it was eaten.

Because the study authors were analyzing cold data, they had no way to examine the pizza or request additional information. So they used databases to estimate the nutritional profile for each helping of pizza mentioned.

The results showed that in 2003, pizza was the second-highest source of calories in American youngsters’ diets. However, young people’s caloric intake from pizza declined by about 25 percent from 2003 to 2010.

That’s good news, but consider this finding — even in 2010, on the days young people ate pizza, it accounted for roughly one-fourth of their total caloric intake.

So, parents might want to take a look at their children’s pizza consumption and see if pizza time is getting a little too close to being “all the time.”

If so, it might be time to cut back.

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