Two British studies suggest that pizza is bad for you – whether you're eating it or delivering
Is it safer to deliver pizza or to eat it? Photograph: Richard Saker
Pizza is dangerous. Pizza is beneficial. If you hold either of these opinions, published research agrees with you, especially research in England and Italy.
Two British studies highlight, darkly, some dangers that accompany pizza that's served too speedily or too heartily. One, a monograph in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention, explains that, whatever the good or bad of eating pizza may be, delivering the pies can put you on a collision course with unhappiness.
Dr Chris McLean and his colleague J Bernard at Mayday University Hospital in Croydon say they were inspired by a 1992 report in the journal Injury by Dr MG Dorrell of Edgware General Hospital in north London. Dorrell "described a series of six patients who sustained bony injuries in road traffic accidents during the course of their employment as pizza delivery personnel". Subsequently, the Pizza and Pasta Association, acting in concert with the government, developed a voluntary code of practice for home delivery individuals, with the goal of reducing or even eliminating pizza/transportation-induced bony and other injuries.
McLean and Bernard, a decade after the Edgware pizza study, analysed what happened to three pizza delivery moped drivers who were themselves delivered to Mayday University Hospital. "None of them possessed a full UK driver's licence," they wrote, and "all three were involved in collisions with automobiles." One simply fell off his moped; the other two "somersaulted over their moped handlebars". Piecing together the available evidence, McLean and Bernard tentatively concluded that "non-native workers who lack English language skills and moped driving skills are at increased risk of moped accidents".
Thus, it is known that pizza can be a nexus of havoc even prior to ingestion.
A new report, by James Catton and Dileep Lobo at the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham – published appropriately, maybe inevitably, in the medical journal Gut – explains what can happen when someone consumes too much pizza and too much lubricant with too much gusto.
First, they tell what led to the problem: "A previously healthy 16-year-old male student was admitted with acute abdominal pain after eating two large pizzas and drinking five pints of beer." Then they show you the problem, twice. First, a CT image of the young man's woeful belly contents. Then, a quasi-psychedelic colour photo taken during laparoscopic surgery. This is an insider's view, a spelunker/tourist's view of the inside of a seldom-visited cave. During the surgical procedure, we learn from the accompanying text, "a large amount of undigested pizza and beer were evacuated from the peritoneal cavity".
The authors conclude with a few poetically chosen words about the blooming, buzzing confusion that was the patient's guts: "We hypothesise that binge eating and drinking resulted in gastric distension which progressed to acute gastric dilatation and raised intra-abdominal pressure, which may have compromised splanchnic perfusion in our patient."
That's a quick look at some of the biomedical downsides of pizza. Next week, we'll look at some Italian research studies that hint, oh so temptingly, that eating pizza improves your health.
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/aug/09/pizza-dangers-improbable-research
