Eat Balanced Pizza: 'Healthier Than a Salad'?
A new seaweed-infused frozen pizza is healthier than the salads you can buy in stores, its makers claim.
The frozen pizza, now sold in England and Wales in addition to Scotland, contains 47 essential nutrients, with vitamin- and mineral-rich ingredients, including ground seaweed and red pepper.
"Find me a salad that matches up to the Eat Balanced pizza," Professor Mike Lean, chair of human nutrition at Glasgow University, told the Daily Mail.
Professor Lean teamed up with Donnie Maclean, an entrepreneur looking for new business ventures, to create the product.
According to Lean, the £3.50 ($4.51) pizzas are a healthier option than supermarket salads.
"This is the only nutritionally-balanced ready meal anywhere," Lean told the European Congress on Obesity in Liverpool this week.
Rival frozen pizzas clock in at around 300 calories and 13 grams of fat, whereas the Eat Balanced pizza contains 172 calories and 5.3 grams of fat, according to the company's research.
"Nobody has previously designed a meal which has got everything in the right proportions," Lean said. "I'm pretty proud of it."
Maclean came up with the idea of enriching the pizza using seaweed, collected from the beaches of the archipelago off the west coast of mainland Scotland. The seaweed provides the added vitamins and minerals that set the pizza apart from competitors.
The seaweed is ground up and added to the part-wholemeal flour base, giving the pizza a gritty taste, and enriching it with iron, zinc, vitamin B12, and iodine.
The frozen pizza may not be as good as fresh pizza, Lean admitted.
"You are not sitting on the seats of Sorrento eating it," Lean said. "It is a frozen pizza but it tastes, smells, and looks as good as any other frozen pizza."
Dr Maria Bryant, of the UK Association for the Study of Obesity, commented on the health claims surrounding the frozen pizza.
"I support the move towards improving existing foods that are very popular but I am not sure that eating two or three pizzas a day would be the best approach," Bryant said.
She also warned that seaweed is an acquired taste.