With ‘healthy pizza,’ BU Nutrition Club makes eating well look easy, cheesy

As spring break comes to an end, summer rapidly approaches and the end-of-semester slump sets in, the Boston University Nutrition Club sees the perfect opportunity to continue its efforts to promote a healthy lifestyle for the entire BU community. Beginning their month-long series of classes and demonstrations in honor of National Nutrition Month, which kicked off at the start of March, the group co-hosted a how-to Monday night tackling, maybe counter-intuitively, healthy pizza.

This year’s theme for National Nutrition Month, as set forth by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, is “Bite into a Healthy Lifestyle,” a campaign that encourages people to maintain both a smaller caloric intake and an active physical routine in order to promote overall wellness. For the first in the series, the Nutrition Club collaborated with Spoon University, a website dedicated to helping students make conscious decisions when it comes to what they are eating.

“We thought we’d do a series, to incorporate a lot more education into our events to start spreading awareness of this month, in general,” said Michelle Ly, a senior in the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and president of BU Nutrition Club.

The Nutrition Club is committed to demonstrating that making conscious decisions regarding students’ diet are not as daunting as they seem. As Samantha Huang, a SAR junior and the club’s vice president put it, getting a start on a healthier lifestyle requires “small steps” that make maintaining a nutritious diet a feasible objective. This is one of the main points that BU’s Nutrition Club strives to get across.

“It’s not like, ‘I have to drop all of my favorite foods.’ It’s as simple as replacing a side of fries with a side of salad,” Huang said. “A colorful plate usually means vegetables.”

To that end, Monday’s pizza party allowed participants to get hands-on experience in making a healthy meal out of a common “favorite food,” a clear demonstration of how easy it can be to prepare healthy alternatives for dinner. Participants collaboratively prepared zucchini pizza bites as a starter, flatbread pizza as the main dish and a fruit pizza as a dessert. The preparation of these three dishes allowed participants to engage in conversation and listen to music as they executed the recipes to produce a delicious, three-course meal.

Ly said engagements like Monday’s amount to “starting small,” the key to beginning a healthy dietary routine.

“It’s important for people to remain educated as they are making changes in their diet that could affect their lives,” she said.

The club has long emphasized the importance of nutritional education by hosting themed meetings that incorporate various aspects of leading an active and healthy life. In order to eat healthy, Ly said, people need to know what healthy eating actually entails.

“Some people are like, ‘I want to go gluten-free!’ and don’t know what it means,” Ly said. “So I think understanding what all these different fad diets are is really important.”

All that knowledge, though, is nothing without the execution. In keeping with National Nutrition Month’s goal of spreading the health, so to speak, Ly said the Nutrition Club also aims to put emphasis on teaching the “how” alongside the “what,” whether students are tossing a salad or tossing together zucchini pizza bites.

“I know a lot of people who live in apartments. A lot of my friends always wonder how they can eat healthy on a college budget or how to eat healthy at the dining hall,” she said. “And we kind of hope that by attending our meetings and making these recipes, they have fun and get their hands on the experience that they don’t usually get.”