Healthy Food Choices: Pizza

Pizza is one of America's favorite foods and with a little help it can be a healthy food. Learn some tips on creating your own healthy pizza in this video.

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Don't add too much cheese
Try using more vegetable toppings
Thin crust pizza is lower in calories

About this Author

Alice Merritt is currently the Campus Dietitian at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She has a masters degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in public health with a concentration on nutrition. Alice has worked as a registered dietician for four years, and believes that helping people reach their nutritional goals will lead to a long and healthy life.

ALICE MERRITT: Now I am going to talk to you about pizza. Pizza is one of Americans favorite foods and can be a healthy choice. If you think about it, pizza is actually pretty balanced. You have your crust as your carbohydrate, you have your tomato sauce as a vegetable and then you have your cheese as a good proteins or dairy source. The only thing that tends to make pizza unhealthy is a lot of the high fat toppings we like to add to it such as adding extra cheese, pepperoni, sausage, and some of the other high fat meats--bacon. Ways that you can make pizza healthy is if you kind of just sprinkle lightly the cheese on there, order light cheese and increase the vegetables that you have on your pizza. That can actually reduce the calorie content, the more vegetables that you add. Important things to know about pizza, if you have a side salad with it then limit yourself to one or two pieces of pizza. Thin crust pizza is going to be lower in calories than thick crust pizza. Remember to go light on the cheese and try to limit the high fat meats such as pepperoni, sausage, bacon. And also load up your pizzas with veggies. Another good thing that you can do with pizza is make homemade pizzas. You can buy those whole wheat crusts at the grocery store, use tomato sauce, lightly sprinkle cheese and then put on any of your favorite fresh vegetables. These are all healthy recommendations for pizza.

Healthy Food Choices: Pizza Video

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