BOSTON — Pizza might be hailed as the food of the gods, one of America's best-loved meals, a hearty, delectable dish that fills the stomach and soothes the soul.
But to low-carb dieters, it's just a gut-busting disk of dough.
And that has caused pizza makers around the nation to wonder if the low-carbohydrate craze will force changes in one of America's best-loved foods.
They're saying, "Hey, we've got a problem here. Pizza's built on bread. It's the No. 1 enemy of the Atkinites," said Tom Boyles, senior editor of PMQ Magazine, a publication that follows the pizza industry.
Although industry sales haven't taken a hit yet, some pizza operators are considering offering customers low-carbohydrate pizzas.
According to the National Association of Pizzeria Operators, about 3 billion pizzas are sold each year in the United States by about 40,000 shops.
At the same time, low-carbohydrate diets such as the Atkins, South Beach and Zone have gained wider popularity. A Harris Interactive poll done last summer for Novartis Consumer Health estimated that 32 million Americans were on some kind of high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet.
Doug Ferriman, owner of Crazy Dough's Pizza in Cambridge's Harvard Square, said he didn't think low-carbohydrate dieters would put "too much of a dent" in the pizza business, but he had clipped a recipe for low-carbohydrate dough from an industry publication and said he was going to try it.
Some pizzerias already have moved to meet low-carbohydrate dieters' demands.
In Columbus, Ohio, Donatos Pizzeria has announced it will roll out a pizza with a low-carbohydrate soy protein crust in its 182 outlets. In Louisville, Ky., Bearno's Pizza offers a crustless pizza on the usual circular baking pan.
And in Escondido, Calif., John Pontrelli, owner of Pit Stop Pasta, offers what may be a traditionalist's worst nightmare: "pizza in a bucket." It has all the pizza toppings placed in a crock or, for takeout customers, a metal can.
At Low-Carb Creations in Vancouver, Wash., Craig Adams, vice president and general manager, said sales of low-carbohydrate pizza dough have risen 300 to 400 percent in the past six months. Adams said the company, which has 17 employees, has agreements to provide the crusts to several small chains and dozens of stores.
Tom Lehmann of the American Institute of Baking in Manhattan, Kansas, a consultant who works with bakeries and pizza operations worldwide, said: "Low-carb is probably the biggest pebble to be dropped in this little pizza pond for a long time."
Lehmann, who writes for industry publications such as "The Dough Doctor," said he has received an average of five requests per day for the past three months on how to make low-carbohydrate dough. He said his own experiments had turned out a product that tasted, well, different.
"If you consider a pizza crust as being an edible breadlike product that's located beneath the toppings ... OK, that's all we can say about it," he said. "Wipe away any memories of your old traditional pizza crust."
