Too Many Frozen Pizza Options Are Making You Fat

It's been called the tyranny of choice: When you have a plethora of options presented to you, choosing just one becomes hard work. That's why we tend, in a moment of panic, to choose them all.

Just consider the standard Americanized Chinese restaurant menu, with its 30 varieties of cornstarch-fried beef and pork-filled dumplings. You could stick to the same ol' General Tso's chicken every time, or you could branch out into that special menu with the gizzards and the definitely not-fresh scallops.

But a recent study published in PLOS One suggests that people who play the field with their options, as it were, tend to overeat.

Researchers at the University of Liverpool polled approximately 200 people on their eating habits, specifically relating to pepperoni pizza. As any red-blooded American well knows, the great beast known as capitalism has provided us with dozens of options for this one dish in the frozen section of the supermarket. The researchers wanted to know if such a bounty of choice—with wildly varying calorie counts between different brands and styles of pepperoni pizza—has an effect on our ability to control food intake. Could endless access to frozen pizza of every stripe be contributing to obesity?

In short, yes. Duh.

But it's not just the consumption of frozen pizza at work—it's all of those available options. (The researchers singled out a mere 70 different types of pizza.) It turns out that study participants who stuck to a single brand of pizza were less likely to overeat than those who ate pizzas from many other brands.

The thing is, frozen pepperoni pizzas (and many other kinds of popular foods) are not all made the same; one could clock in at 500 calories, while another of similar shape and size could pack in three times that.

But shoppers aren't always looking at nutrition labels. Instead, the people who ate many different brands of pizza more or less equated them in their minds, even if they were nutritionally very different. "As predicted, higher pizza variability was associated with reduced compensation for calories in pepperoni pizza at a subsequent test meal (i.e., overeating)," write the study authors, noting that the more brands of pizza people consumed, the less full they tended to feel afterward.

"We found that people who ate a wide range of different brands and types of pepperoni pizza were more likely to carry on eating more, and were more likely to think the pizza was less filling," said lead study author Dr. Charlotte Hardman in a statement. "It would appear that this high variability of food items makes it more difficult for people to learn about food and manage their consumption which exposes a new feature of Western diets and which has potential public health implications."

The takeaway? The cornucopia of processed foods available to most of us—and not just the foods themselves—could be seriously damaging our understanding of how much we need to eat and what food does to our bodies.

So just stick with homemade pizza. It's better anyway.