TORONTO – Can’t decide between pizza or cheeseburgers for dinner? Hop on a plane to England and find the nearest Pizza Hut.
After roaring success in the Middle East, the pizza chain’s almost 3,000-calorie cheeseburger crust pizza launched across the United Kingdom this week. And it isn’t making health officials happy.
Remember the simple days of cheesy stuffed crust? They’re over now.
Over the past few years, Pizza Hut has ushered in hot dog stuffed crust in many parts of the world, to cheesy beef poutine pizza and creamy butter chicken pizza, now on Canadian menus.
Read more: What Canadians want to know about what’s in fast food meals
As for the U.K. – that nation got a pizza featuring ten mini burgers topped with mozzarella built into the crust. It’s the spawn of the “Crown Crust” pizza of the Middle East that featured “a crown shaped crust filled with gems of cream cheese and meatballs.”
(Screen grab/Global News)
Neither of the options are what the doctor ordered, according to British newspapers.
“If I had a family of 10 and we had all been on a brisk five mile walk in the rain and lost our picnic on the way, I might just buy one to ensure that everyone got a warm something inside them,” Tam Fry, spokesman for the British National Obesity Forum, told the Telegraph.
“For your average family, however, divvying up this pizza in any other way is unreasonable and irresponsibly marketed.”
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At 288 calories a slice, just half of the pizza is enough to account for more than 72 per cent of a woman’s daily intake, the newspaper said.
The pizza chain hasn’t shared the fat, saturated fat, sodium and carbohydrate count on this meal either.
But Pizza Hut wants reporters to remind customers that this menu item isn’t meant to be a meal for one.
“We would like the calories mentioned in the context of it is a pizza designed for sharing, the whole pizza is not designed for one person,” spokeswoman Gemma Hinksman said.
Read more: Preschoolers’ eating habits linked to future heart health risks, Canadian study suggests
The cheeseburger-pizza hybrid won’t be coming to Canada, but that’s because we had a Crown Crust pizza of our own last March and April.
“And it was extremely popular in Canada,” the Canadian spokeswoman Debra Quinn said.
If the cheeseburger crust pizza is roughly 288 calories a slice, the poutine option Canadians have now clocks in at 320 calories a slice.
Read more: 5 healthy fast food swaps
But these are small fries next to the big league: 7,000- calorie cronut burger and 530-calorie Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast sandwiches that also made headlines this year.
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carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
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