Slice of Death

During the last three decades, the nutrition nannies at the Center for Science in the Public Interest have warned us away from fat, salt, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, beef, candy, breakfast cereals, fried food, fast food, processed food, Italian food, Chinese food, Mexican food, delicatessen food, and movie theater popcorn, among other things. It's hard to believe that they are only now getting around to pizza.

"More cheese on your pizza means more crust in your arteries," says CSPI nutritionist Jayne G. Hurley, who is positively indignant at the innovative ways pizza chains have found to sneak fat past their customers' lips. "You need cheese stuffed into a pizza crust like you need reverse liposuction to force more fat under your skin." Even worse, Pizza Hut combines stuffed crust with meat toppings, providing "the worst of both worlds, with about a day's worth of sodium and saturated fat in just two slices."

And don't even get her started on cheesy bread. "Cheesy bread?" she exclaims. "To go alongside an entree that's mostly bread and cheese? Please!"

Along with press-friendly quotes, the pizza exposé offers eye-catching nutritional equivalencies, a CSPI trademark. For example, "Just one slice of Pizza Hut's Big New Yorker Sausage pizza does more damage than a McDonald's Big Mac."

In previous reports, which have made liberal use of phrases like "artery-clogging" and "heart-stopping," CSPI has said eating "chile rellenos is like eating a whole stick of butter," compared kung pao chicken to "four McDonald's quarter-pounders," and revealed that a medium-sized container of popcorn with butter-flavored topping has "more fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big-Mac-with-fries lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings combined."

But CSPI's most memorable bit of invective was probably when it called fettucine Alfredo "a heart attack on a plate." Fans of the organization's propaganda (now available in a new collection) may wonder why they haven't seen more put-downs in this vein–say, the quesadilla as "a stroke in a tortilla" or haggis as "an embolism in a sheep's stomach."

Although CSPI's reports have attracted much criticism and ridicule over the years, they've also won the organization plenty of free publicity, which is presumably why they keep coming. Yet they may not serve the group's goal of getting Americans to eat better. The general impression they create is that if it tastes good, it must be bad for you.

The other side of this coin is that if it's good for you, it must taste bad. "I like my vegetables and rice as much as somebody likes their steak and french fries," CSPI Executive Director Michael Jacobson once told me. Somehow I doubt it.