Huffington Magazine Issue 8 | Page 80

Exit We’ve merged everything together to come up with one complete pizza solution: a complete balanced meal.” FOOD HUFFINGTON 08.05.12 MAKE HEALTHIER HOMEMADE PIZZA Use Cooked Tomato Sauce HE AVERAGE AMERICAN consumes 23 pounds of pizza every year, but a recent development in the food industry has made it possible for that figure — but not the already bursting national waistline — to balloon. Glasgow University nutritionist and professor Mike Lean and British entrepreneur Donnie Maclean teamed up to develop what they claim is a nutritionally balanced pizza. Each serving of the frozen pizza contains 30 percent of an individual’s daily nutritional requirements for vitamins, minerals, calories, carbohydrates and protein. Swapping in traditional ingredients for nutritional replacements — adding seaweed to the crust, for instance — the team was able to reduce the amount of salt and fat in their pizza while adding in essential vitamins and nutrients. Other tricks, like adding red pepper to the tomato sauce to boost its vitamin C content and concocting unusual T Fresh, uncooked tomato sauce sounds like a healthier option than traditional marinara, but that’s usually not the case. Cooking tomatoes brings out their lycopene, a powerful antioxidant that may help to prevent some chronic disease. Use Sauce With Olive Oil Make sure your sauce has olive oil, which greatly increases the absorption of lycopene. Our bodies don’t absorb lycopene without fat, so in the same way that a salad is better for you with a little dressing, sauce is also better with a little oil.