How to Make Your Pizza Healthier: 13 Creative Ways

Photo: Eating Well

Instead of giving up pizza for good, there are many ways you can make pizza a healthy option. It's all about how you eat it and what ingredients you can add to or the quantity of the ingredients used. And in some cases, pizza can be healthy.

Here KnowInsider will reveal 13 creative ways to make your pizza healthier:

#1. Order thin crust instead of a deep pan.

Avoiding deep pan pizzas saves both calories and carbs. Plus, deep dish pizzas often have a lot more toppings and cheese.

You can either make your own crust or buy ready-made or use other “crusts”. You can use whole wheat pita bread or tortillas. A Cretan company has recently made frozen pizza crusts with only flour a bit of olive oil and yeast. And that is what you should be looking for if you buy ready-made crusts: they should only contain flour, yeast and salt, and optionally olive oil. It should not contain no-name vegetable oil, preservatives, or anything else for that matter.

#2. Blot away some of the oil.

Many pizza chains use a hard cheese which releases quite a lot of oil when the pizza is baked. Each teaspoon of oil has about 40kcal and 4.5g of fat in it, so taking a second to blot some of it away reduces the calories and fat content.

#3. Eat it from a plate, not a takeaway box. Eating food from a smaller plate tricks the brain into thinking it has eaten more, so you'll be full sooner.

Photo: Dream's Time

#4. Cut your slices smaller. It works similarly to eating from a smaller plate.

#5. Avoid certain toppings. Steer clear of fatty sausages and pepperoni, extra cheese, creamy sauces, and stuffed crusts to save on the amount of fat and calories you're consuming.

Photo: Iceland

#6. Don't order a stuffed crust. Yes, it looks and tastes delicious, but a stuffed crust is often filled with cheese or butter which will only increase the calories and the fat content, according to Cosmo Politan.

#7. Add certain toppings. This is the perfect opportunity to load up on vegetables and make up to your 7 – 9 a day, and to increase your nutrients intake. Tomatoes, onions, peppers, olives, courgettes, aubergines are all great for this. Parma ham and other lean meats are also good sources of protein and flavor.

Photo: Taste of Home

#8. Order with less cheese than normal. If you can request to double up the serving of cheese on your pizza, it's likely you'll be able to opt for a half-portion. This would save extra saturated fat and calories.

#9. Use whole wheat flour if you're making your own dough. White flour is refined, which means the wheat has had its fibrous shell removed, leaving just the starch inside. Our bodies quickly turn this into sugar. But if you use whole wheat flour - a complex carb - you get all the nutrients and it'll leave you feeling fuller for longer.

#10. Don’t eat pizza alone, add a salad.

In the summer a Greek-style salad with tomato, cucumber, oregano, and olive oil works well and in the winter a cabbage-carrot salad or a romaine salad with olive oil and vinegar are good choices.

Photo: Vegetarian Barbarian

#11. Add greens as a pizza topping.

Load your pizza with vegetables. Once you add vegetables to pizza you automatically make it a bit healthier. Vegetables such as mushrooms, onions, peppers, artichokes, spinach, broccoli are good choices. Tomato sauce (rich in lycopene) also counts as a vegetable and don’t forget to add the antioxidant-rich oregano and garlic to your tomato sauce, as cited by Olive Tomato.

#12. Make your own tomato sauce.

Home-make it using tinned tomatoes, as ready-made sauces often have a lot of sugar. Add in onions, carrots, and other vegetables for a vegetable loaded sauce.

Photo: Paper Blog

#13. Use fresh buffalo mozzarella. Not only does it taste 372649 times niced (an estimate), but it's only about 22% fat and is packed with protein, unlike cheddar cheese, for example, which is 45% fat. Feta, ricotta, or goat’s cheese are also good lower fat cheese options.

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