阅读理解
A team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago
found that too many kids are eating too much pizza and too many calories are doing
harm to children's health.
"There are a lot of takeaways from the study. But the biggest
thing is that parents are serving their kids too much pizza," said Dr. William
Dietz, one of the study's authors and the director of the Sumner M. Redstone Global
Center for Prevention and Wellness at the Milken Institute of Public Health at the
George Washington University.
The researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey, which tracked the diets of more than 11,000 children and teenagers.
Researchers figured how many children eat pizza in the United States, how often
they eat it, and how much they eat when they do.
Pizza, pretty alarmingly, is the second leading source of calories
in the diets of America's children, next only to grain desserts, such as cookies
and other sweets. On any given day, roughly 20 percent of all children aged 2 to
11 and adolescents aged 12 to 19 eat pizza. And when they do, they eat a lot of
it. When children eat pizza, they eat roughly 400 calories, according to the study.
For teenagers, it's upwards of 600 calories.
All that is pretty problematic, according to Dietz largely because
kids don't tend to balance the pizza slices with salads, vegetables and other more
nutritional(有营养的)
foodstuffs. Days on which children and teenagers eat pizza are not only associated
with considerably higher intakes of fat, but also, quite simply, with more food:
on average, children consume 84 extra calories on the days they eat pizza, while
adolescents consume an extra 230 calories.
"When you eat extra calories and don't compensate(抵偿) for them at another point of the day or
week, it can lead to weight gain and even obesity." Dietz said.
There is a Silver lining. Pizza consumption is still too
high by nutrition standards, but it's lower than it used to be. Consumption(消费) fell by roughly 25 percent between 2007
and 2016, according to the study. Much of that has come at dinner where it's fallen
by 40 percent for children and about 33 percent for teenagers. It's unclear whether
the decline has been in connection with a growing concern over obesity, especially
among the country's youth.
But the drop in pizza consumption, while significant hasn't been
big enough "It's a positive trend," Dietz said. "But we're not quite
them yet."
It's easy to see the appeal of pizza. It's cheap. Parents can
buy a lot of pizza for not a lot of money. Besides, they can buy pizza from a chain
shop, a mom-and-pop store or a grocery freezer. And it's universally loved. The
estimated 3 billion pizza eaten each year in the United States is a proof of the
food's unmatched popularity. Given how much the country loves pizza, what's to be
done? Dietz suggests pizza with smaller serving sizes and healthier toppings(配料). "We're not suggesting that kids
avoid pizza altogether." said Dietz. "But when parents serve it, it's
important that they understand it's extremely caloric. They should serve smaller
pizza, or at least smaller slices."
