Pepperoni pizza contains a high amount of sodium, fat, and calories. Larger slices with thicker crusts contain more calories than thin crust pizza. By choosing ingredients carefully, you can make a lower fat, low-sodium version at home.
Calories
Commercially available pepperoni pizza slices contain between 200 and 340 calories each, depending on whether they come from a small, medium or large-size pizza. Homemade pizza using low-fat cheese and turkey sausage may also contain about 300 calories per slice, but that slice will be equivalent to about twice the size of a slice of commercially available large pizza.
Fat
Most slices of pepperoni pizza contain 9 to 12 g of fat. Most of this fat is saturated fat, the type that increases your level of LDL or "bad" cholesterol. Homemade pizza can lower the total fat content by using low-fat cheese and turkey pepperoni. In this case, each large slice would contain only about 3 g of fat.
Sodium
Pepperoni pizza contains high levels of sodium. The sodium comes from cheese, pepperoni, the marinara sauce and the crust. For a typical commercially available pizza, the amount of sodium per slice ranges from about 560 mg to 900 mg, almost 60 percent of your total recommended daily limit. Making the pizza homemade, you can use low-sodium cheese, no-salt-added sauce, and dough with no salt added, keeping the total sodium content to a minimum. In this case the main sodium source would come from purchased pepperoni, which contains about 98 mg per slice.
Member Comments