There are dozens of varieties of pizza available from restaurants, stores and recipe sites, ranging from Chicago style deep-dish to Neapolitan to stuffed-crust. Most versions, however, use refined white flour or white bread flour to make the pizza crusts. The recipes that do use whole-wheat flour tend to have more nutritious profiles because they contain added fiber and complex carbohydrates.
Nutrition Facts
Nutrition totals for the wheat pizza you're eating depend on ingredients used as well as serving sizes. If you're dining at a restaurant, it's likely that calorie, fat, cholesterol and sodium counts will be higher. Two slices of California Pizza Kitchen's vegetarian pizza on honey wheat dough, for example, have about 420 calories, 12 g fat and 21 g carbohydrates. In contrast, two slices of "Cooking Light" magazine's fontina, olive and tomato wheat pizza have about 340 calories, 11 g fat, 15 g protein, 47 g carbohydrates and 4.5 g fiber.
Ingredients
The ingredients in your pizza determine how many essential vitamins and minerals you're getting as well as what the final nutritional profile will be. California Pizza Kitchen loads a variety of veggies onto its vegetable pizza, but restaurants that offer whole wheat crusts with high-fat options such as extra cheese, sausage and pepperoni serve up pies that are far from healthy choices. "Cooking Light" suggests using low-fat fontina cheese and part-skim mozzarella to shred calories and fat grams from your dish's total.
Homemade
When you make a whole wheat crust from scratch and compile toppings at home, you can customize your pizza and have a greater degree of control over its nutrition facts. Baking up a thin crust will offer fewer calories than using lots of dough for a thick, breadlike crust. To reduce sodium totals, use homemade tomato sauce with fresh tomatoes and basil leaves. Finally, keep high-fat toppings to a minimum and feature fresh veggies to add essential nutrients to your wheat pizza. If you want to calculate nutrition facts for what you're making, use an online calorie counter. Plug in total amounts of the ingredients you use, and divide by the number of servings.
Considerations
When it's made with whole-wheat crust and low-fat ingredients, pizza can be a healthy meal choice. It offers servings of whole grains, vegetables, lean proteins and dairy products, four out of the five main food groups in MyPyramid. If you're watching your weight, however, do keep in mind that calorie totals can add up fast with additional slices, so eat any type of pizza in moderation.
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