Pizza isn’t typically considered a healthy food, generally for good reason. Pizza usually has too much saturated fat, bad carbs, and if your goal is weight loss, calories. These issues come primarily from cheese, meat toppings, and the crust, but they can all be changed if you’re looking to make a healthy pizza.
Pizza can be a great platform food to do a lot of different things with. At its core, pizza has a solid macro and micro profile. Carbs are provided by the crust, and both protein and fat come from the cheese (and meat if included). A tomato-based sauce provides a lot of the micronutrient benefits, being a good source of vitamins C, K1, and B9, as well as potassium, an important mineral in the body. Other toppings can be added to change this profile, but the core remains the same. I’ll explain the issues and how to fix them ingredient by ingredient, you don’t have to worry about every ingredient if you don’t want to though.
One final note, it may be hard to find these changes in a pre-made pizza, so I’m assuming you are making your own. Also, some suggested changes will require a bit more cooking from scratch than you may be used to. It shouldn’t be anything too complex though, and you can get a lot of benefit from doing your own cooking.
Healthy Pizza Crust
The main issue with regular crust is that is uses refined grain (all-purpose or bread flour usually). Refined grains are “bad” carbs in that they consist mostly of simple carbohydrates and are nutritionally pretty empty. The refining process removes most of the fiber and micronutrients, so switching to whole grain is a healthy alternative. You might be able to find a pre-made whole grain crust at a supermarket, or you could get this one on Amazon. Store-bought items are more likely to have higher amounts of sodium and added sugar though. That’s not always the case though, like with the one I linked on Amazon. Looking at the ingredients section on the nutrition label is a good idea. The fewer the ingredients the better, and you should find salt and added sugar in the “2% or less” section. Alternatively, try looking for some recipes online, you’ll find making your own pizza dough isn’t typically that complicated.
If you want a low-carb or gluten-free alternative, a cauliflower crust might be a great option. Check out this recipe for a basic cauliflower crust, or this one for a vegan option. A cauliflower crust is rich in nutrients like a whole grain crust but is also low-carb and gluten-free. The downside is that a bit more work is required to make it.
Healthy Pizza Sauce
A tomato-based sauce is generally going to be fairly healthy (because of the tomatoes), store-bought sauces will generally be fine (look for 10% or less DV of sodium and less than 2 g added sugar). If you want to though, a homemade sauce can give you more control on the flavor and nutrition. You’ll also be able to control the texture, so if you prefer a thicker or chunkier sauce for example, this could be a great option. Most recipes will be as simple as blending or just mixing some sort of tomato (often canned peeled tomatoes or crushed tomatoes) with salt, sugar, dried herbs, and maybe fresh onion and garlic. I’ve found that most recipes for homemade sauce will use more salt than what you’ll get with a store-bought sauce, so you may want to cut back or even remove the salt if you need to control sodium intake.
Healthy Toppings
While cheese is a good source of protein, it can also be high in saturated fat. There are lots of ways to approach fixing this. You could just remove the cheese, or use less of it. You could switch to using a fat-free (skim) or low-fat version of your favorite cheese. Or you could use a naturally low(er) fat cheese such as Cottage or Ricotta. Meat toppings can have the same issues as cheese, so you could look for low-fat alternatives, like turkey pepperoni for example. Another option is to not use meat at all, you can still make a great tasting pizza with vegetable toppings. Adding vegetables is also a great way to boost the nutritional profile of the pizza too.
