This weeks
Friday Finds pizza! Let’s be honest
here, everybody has nights where they don’t feel like cooking. I know I do and it’s pretty easy to stock the
freezer with frozen pizza. There are so many different brands and types of
pizza out there but I think I found two reasonably healthy choices. The first one is from IGA Compliments
Biologique and the other one is from the Loblaws Blue Menu line. Both are vegetarian.
When
looking for a prepared food like pizza, you have to look at the food
label. I know it’s complicated but if
you start getting used to looking at it you will make healthier food
choices. Depending on your health status,
you will be looking at different parts of the label than someone else. For instance, if you have high blood pressure
the first thing you need to look at is the sodium amount. It really has to be as low as possible. Someone else who is concerned about
cholesterol might need to increase fiber and so on. For my family and myself I am concerned about
portion size, sodium, fibre and fat. When
I say fat, it means I am looking to avoid trans fats and keep our daily intake
of saturated to 10%. Since I rarely cook
with saturated fat (I use unsaturated like canola, grapeseed oil or olive oil
instead) we would get it from something I didn’t make such as frozen pizza.
Both pizzas
contain between 11%-13% saturated fats.
Not too bad if we didn’t eat out at some other point during the
day. There are 2 grams of fiber in the
Blue Menu and 5 in the Compliments. If
you check the ingredients both contain enriched wheat flour but the Compliments
has enriched whole wheat flour which seems to account for the fiber discrepancy. There is 24% (of the daily value) sodium in
the Compliments and 15% in the Blue Menu. Again if you ate low sodium all day
then the Compliments one might be just fine.
Consider the portions sizes for all of this nutrition information. The Blue Menu is for 103 grams and the
Compliments is for 127 grams. It should
be noted that according to Canada’s
Food Guide a serving of grain product weighs about 35 grams. If we take into consideration the toppings on
the pizzas these servings would be equivalent to about 2 – 2.5 grains.
The big selling point for the Compliments pizza is that it is marketed as organic. I pay no attention to this as it means nothing without a proper definition of organic and the origins of their ingredients. I consider it an advertising ploy and not a necessarily a superior nutritional product.
The big
question now is which one tastes better!
I guess that is subjective but we all thought the Blue Menu one tasted
better. It was reminiscent of delivered
pizza with its soft chewy crust. The
cheese and mushrooms had a nice creamy garlic flavor. The Compliments was more crunchy and loaded
with spinach, red peppers, broccoli, mushrooms and onions. The vegetables were a bit soggy.
Since both
pizzas had between 10 – 13 grams of protein a great side dish with these pizzas
could be a chickpea salad or a lentil soup.
What is
your favorite frozen pizza?
Montreal Nutrition 