Restaurants used to be a fun place to go to meet friends and family for dinner, lunch and breakfast, but ever since my doctor educated me on how unhealthy carbs are and how they affect my blood sugar, I realized that very few restaurants offer anything approaching what might be considered low carb.
I got excited a couple of years ago when I heard that California Pizza Kitchen (CPK) would be offering a low-carb cauliflower crust pizza, but, sadly, I soon discovered that the crest was not 100% cauliflower.
A single slice of this pizza would still contain about 14 grams of carbs compared to 21 grams of carbs for a standard flour-based crust. Sure, it’s slightly better than the standard CPK pizza, but not by much, and not enough to get me back in there for lunch or dinner.
It remains a place I miss, but still cannot return there, unless I pass on the pizza and pasta and go with a salad. But why would anyone go there just for a salad, unless you’re invited out with friends and are forced to order something so you won’t look out of place.
But with all that pizza and pasta around, there would be way too much temptation around, especially when your friends or coworkers are encouraging you to just have a piece. “Oh, come on,” they say, “one piece isn’t going to kill you.”
After getting my hopes up high and having them dashed by CPK’s misleading promotion of a new cauliflower-crust pizza, I now was left with an unsatisfied craving for pizza that I just needed to fill.
If CPK was promoting a cauliflower-crust pizza, even though it was anything but low carb, then other food companies might also be discovering that a new market was emerging, that there were a lot of potential customers like myself who were looking for healthy, low-carb versions of pizza and would eagerly move in to fill the void.
So even though I was ultimately disappointed with CPK’s entry into the low- carb market, I was also seeing the silver lining in it. Certainly, if a restaurant like CPK was putting out a cauliflower-crust pizza, then the market for this kind of healthy fare must be getting the attention of other restaurants and food companies too. With that in mind, I set off to my local Wal-Mart to see if there might be a frozen version of the cauliflower-crust pizza. It was worth a try.
After walking over to the frozen foods aisle of the store, it wasn’t long before I discovered a brand name frozen pizza that advertised itself as having cauliflower crust. The brand name was Caulipower and at first glance it looked like I had finally found exactly what I was looking for; a low-carb frozen pizza. Eureka!
But, once again, just like CPK’s “cauliflower crust” pizza, nutritional information on the ingredients of this pizza revealed that it contained quit a bit of rice flour and sugar and less actual cauliflower than its name implies.
Just like CPK, the frozen Caulipower pizza was being advertised as a cauliflower crust pizza even though cauliflower made up only a fraction of the crust. Despite the name, this was not a pizza any keto or low carber could consider.
While it shaved a few carbs off what a regular whole flour crust pizza contains, it was still way too many carbs to be considered as anything approaching keto-friendly territory.
For the second time in a week, I was disappointed by two pizzas advertised as cauliflower crust, both of which turned out to have plenty of rice flour and sugar in it them too, rendering its cauliflower ingredient basically irrelevant.
In an attempt to attract customers like myself who need to keep their carb counts low., CPK and Caulipower promoted pizzas that might sound healhty, but are anything but, at least for those us who have to limit our carbs.
For most of us needing to keep a close eye on our blood sugar, eating low carb is not a fad or the latest diet trend to be exploited for more profit. It’s a medical necessity and it’s serious business.
Seeing two different food companies taking advantage of this by promoting a cauliflower-crust pizza that contains lots of rice flour and its corresponding high-carb count, is a reminder that we all need to read the nutritional labels on our food products carefully.
If these two cauliflower crust pizzas are any indication, we can expect to see an increasing number of these high-carb pizza products deceptively posing as low carb in our restaurants and supermarkets. We have to be able to spot these impostors when we see them.
