Probiotic Pizza?
There are times I’m alternately fascinated and repelled by the stuff the food industry comes up with. On the one hand, I can’t really object to entrepreneurs pushing healthier versions of not-so-healthy-but-extremely-popular food products… but on the other hand, it seems somewhat exploitative too. Marketing better quality junk/snack/convenience foods as “healthy” implies that consumers don’t really have to change their eating habits… just their product choices. In other words, they can have their cake and eat it too… or in this case, pizza.
The gut health market is growing, driven predominantly by yogurt shots from household names like Dannon, but if the vision and plans of a New Orleans-based archaeologist-turned-entrepreneur come to fruition, the gut-health market could soon be colonized by pizzas.
Naked Pizza started in 2006 and is the brainchild of Jeff Leach, an archaeologist by trade and head of Paleobiotics Lab, a New Mexico-based independent research group investigating the implications of dietary and nutritional evolution and its bearing on modern health.
…The pizza crust is formulated with 12 types of whole grain, including amaranth and buckwheat, and fortified with Beneo Orafti’s Synergy1 prebiotic, and Ganeden’s heat resistant Bacillus coagulans strain, said Leach.
A two-slice serving delivers a Bacillus coagulans payload of one billion colony forming units (cfu) and five grams of Synergy1, he said.
If you’re going to eat pizza, then one with added whole grains, prebiotic fiber and probiotic bacteria will certainly be superior to what Pizza Hut or Papa John’s has to offer, although I’m politely skeptical that palliatives like “Naked Pizza” will ultimately “change the health of the nation.”
But, we’ll see. The company recently got a major boost from the Kraft Group, and is planning to expand nationwide. If a franchise eventually opens nearby, I’ll have to check it out. 😉
