One P'Zone Packs Quite a Wallop

I saw a commercial the other day for Pizza Hut's P'Zone, the fast-food chain's version of a calzone, and I couldn't believe how big the thing looked on TV—it was wider than the actor's head. I went to Pizza Hut's website, where the P'Zone was also being heavily promoted, and learned that one P'Zone—basically pizza dough folded over and stuffed with pizza toppings like meat—weighs in at more than a pound. And the marketing message is very much that this is a one-person meal. The promotional tagline on the website: "Big enough to share! So good you won't want to!" And on one commercial I found on YouTube: "The Pizza Hut P'Zone is yours alone!"

I was curious about how a pound of cheese, meat, and dough stacks up nutritionally. In its nutrition guide, though, Pizza Hut points out that a serving is actually half a P'Zone. If you follow that unadvertised guideline and split it with a friend, each of you will get between 610 and 690 calories, depending on the filling, and between 23 and 29 grams of fat. But if you do as the ads promote and keep it "yours alone," you get from 1,220 to 1,380 calories and between 46 and 58 grams of fat. That's from 70 to 90 percent of your recommended daily calories from fat, if you eat 2,000 calories a day. Eating an entire P'Zone will also give you between 112 and 144 percent of your daily sodium recommendation.

It goes to show that you really do have to check serving sizes carefully; what you (or the company's own ads) consider a serving and what the actual nutritional information is based on may be two different things. As my colleague Adam Voiland wrote recently, there are more nutritionally balanced options at many fast-food restaurants. Pizza Hut has its own nutrition calculator, too, which can help you find better choices than the P'Zone.