Health-consciousness seems to have exploded in recent years, especially where diet is concerned.
Concerns over ultra-processed foods (UPFs), sugar content, and poorly-understood additives run rampant on social media, giving rise to raw food movements and a general cynicism over what’s really in our grub.
Underpinning much of this is the age-old wisdom that ‘junk’ food – crisps, fizzy drinks, sweets, fast food, pizzas, kebabs et al – is bad for us. High levels of sodium, sugar, and fats contribute to weight gain, poor cardiovascular health, high blood pressure and more, and this has driven advice around limiting how much of the stuff we consume.
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Where pizza is concerned, one nutritional expert reckon it’s the ‘worst thing we can eat’, which will come as bad news to the millions of us who love the Italian dish.
Javier Furman, a physiotherapist and integrative health expert, told Lavan Guardia that pizza can increase inflammation and thereby spur arthritis, diabetes and dementia.
“Ultra-processed pizza is harmful because it combines all the foods that promote chronic low-grade inflammation,” he said.
Appearing on the ‘Tengo un plan’ podcast, Furman said that even occasional or weekly consumption of such foods can have significant health impacts owing to the ingredients common to UPFs.
He said that pizza combines the worst of all worlds, with refined flours, sugars, industrially-produced dairy and processed fats all contributing to inflammation.
“If we get used to eating refined flours, bacteria will overgrow that paralyse our gut, and the problem is that if the intestine is inflamed, the rest of the body will be too,” he claimed.
He warned that even physically-active people can develop inflammation-linked diseases like cancers and heart disease if they regularly eat UPFs, adding that they can negatively impact upon muscle and joint regeneration.
“Many people eat pizza as an emotional refuge, perpetuating a cycle of artificial pleasure-metabolic imbalance,” he said, noting how UPFs being ‘comfort foods’ can ironically make us feel worse psychologically.
He suggested that people adopt an anti-inflammatory diet: cutting UPFs and focusing instead nutritionally-dense foods instead.
Those would include vegetables, animal-based proteins, eggs, and offal.
He also suggested opting for foods with healthy fats, such as avocados, nuts, oily fish, and olive oil.
In terms of what to avoid, Furman suggested completely excluding refined flours, sugars, UPFs, vegetable oils and low-quality dairy products from our diets.
His anti-pizza stance is backed by a report published by the Miguel Hernández University of Elche, which said that pizza in particular has a profound effect upon increased cholesterol, blood pressure, and damaged metabolisms.
Rachael Davis