Pizza for Breakfast Is Good for Your Health, This Expert Says

Pizza? For breakfast?! No, we’re not talking Bagel Bites (which are neither pizza nor bagels if you think about it), but the real deal. And while only a true genius would list “eat more pizza” as their New Year’s resolution, one ‘food expert’ claims that morning ‘za is the secret to starting your day on a zesty, healthy note.

Jason Bull, who knows a thing or two about flour from his role as managing director of healthy snack company Bite UK, told the New York Post that there’s “no better time than breakfast” to stuff your face with everyone’s favorite arrangement of dough, tomato sauce, and cheese. From his perspective, pizza’s value as a morning meal comes down to one thing: carbs. “The nutritional value of pizza in general is carbohydrates… with breakfast being the most important meal of the day, you need carbs within that.”

Though most of us see grabbing a slice from the fridge the morning after a night of debauchery as nothing more than a desperate hangover cure or a guilty pleasure, Bull asserts that pizza plays a much different role in Italian culture before noon than what one would expect.

“There are different [Italian] pizzas for different times of the day. In the Roma region for breakfast, they eat what’s called Pizza Impala… It’s very light, aerated and very crispy, and they’ll put low fat meats, raw vegetables and low fat cheese and things like that on top of it,” he says.

With that in mind, Bull foresees that health-conscious and breakfast-friendly mindset working its way into how the rest of the world thinks about pizza in 2018. Specifically, he expects a gradual shift from standard doughs to spelt and rye flours, which up the fiber while cutting out gluten.

Vegetable-based flours, which add nutritional benefits and colorful pizzaz to the traditional pizza, might also catch on as eaters look for healthier takes on an old favorite. “These alternative flours are made from beetroot and spinach, creating a stand-out purple or green pizza base which tastes delicious and will satisfy the most discerning healthy eater,” Bull says.

While it’s too soon to expect your local pizza place to serve you a slice on your way into work, hopefully the new year brings an end to pre-noon pizza-shaming. But no matter what kind of dough or toppings you choose, life’s too short to get hung up on the haters who tell you not to eat pizza for breakfast anyway.