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 On pizza eating days, kids ate an average of 83 more calories, and
teens had an average of 230 more calories, than on non-pizza days.
Kids and teens also got 3 to 5 more grams of saturated fat on pizza
days, and 100 to 400 more milligrams of sodium.
“What this is saying is kids are not adequately compensating in
other parts of their diet when they eat pizza, and these are
nutrients that we want to limit,” lead author Lisa M. Powell told
Reuters Health by phone.
Powell, of the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois
at Chicago, and colleagues analyzed National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey data on a national sample of kids ages 2 to 19
between 2003 and 2010, and found that calorie intake from pizza
actually declined, but was still associated with unhealthier eating
days.
“We wanted to answer the question, ‘does it matter that pizza is one
of the top contributors to kids’ diets?” said Powell.
It does matter, since eating pizza adds extra calories and fat to
the day for the average kid, she and her colleagues write in
Pediatrics.
Youngsters were surveyed about the food they had consumed over the
previous 24 hours, twice in a ten-day period. (For small children,
parents answered the questions.)
In the 2009-2010 survey, 20 percent of younger kids and 23 percent
of teens ate pizza on any given day. On pizza-eating days, younger
kids ate an average of 408 calories worth of pizza and teens ate
about 624 calories of pizza, which is actually less than in the
2003-2004 survey year.
That decline may be because individual kids were eating fewer slices
at a time in 2010, or because the pizza itself had gotten slightly
healthier, Powell said.
The American Heart Association recommends that kids age four to 18
consume between 1,200 and 2,200 calories per day, depending on their
age and gender.
Snack time pizza was associated with the most extra calories, fat
and salt, more than pizza eaten for lunch or dinner, the authors
found.
“It has quite an adverse effect as a snack,” Powell said. “Not a lot
of kids are consuming pizza as a snack, but it’s definitely
something they shouldn’t be doing.”
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Consumption may be going down, but portion sizes for pizza and
Mexican food have both gone up over recent years in the U.S., said
Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition and public health researcher at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“It seems to me actually a worse product than it would have been 15
to 20 years ago,” said Popkin, who was not involved in the new
study.
“These are products that you eat only as your meal, and you tend not
to eat salad as well,” Popkin told Reuters Health by phone.
Pizza consumption may be on the decline in the U.S., but that is not
the case globally, he said.
“If you look at pizza consumption globally, in low and middle income
countries the pizza market is really exploding,” he said.
Powell hopes that parents will recognize the role pizza plays in
their kids’ diets and that pediatricians together can urge the pizza
industry to make their products healthier, perhaps by lowering the
saturated fat content.
“That would be a voluntary effort, but hopefully parents can use
their pizza dollars to make healthier choices,” she said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1uik2CF
Pediatrics, January 19, 2015.
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