FACTOR-IN/FACTOR-OUT™

We’ve scoured supermarkets and restaurants to find healthy F–Factor® approved food swaps for high-calorie favorites. Now you can satisfy your cravings without sabotaging your waistline.* 

Lasagna lova? Listen up!

Fun fact: the word “lasagne” actually refers to the type of wide, flat pasta used to make the layered pasta-sauce-cheese, pasta-sauce-cheese dish regularly referred to as “lasagna”. Technically speaking, lasagna is one noodle, or pasta sheet; lasagne is the plural, referring to the pasta sheets. Tomayto, tomahto the lesser fun fact is that layering up Barilla lasagne to make a classic lasagna dish is a less than light move. Follow the recipe on the back of the blue box and you’re adding 950 calories in pasta alone to your hearty homemade dish. Matters are made worse when you enter the gluten-free pasta realm. Go the gluten-free route and Barilla’s oven-ready lasagne goes up from 37g carb per serving to 42g… for just 3 sheets! Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but being very low carb and gluten-free is just one of the many reasons why the product we’re talking about here is a real win. Stay with us for a second here…

Pasta is, without a doubt, the reason traditionally prepared lasagna can end up around 50g carbs per serving. To put that number into perspective for you, picture a plate of 20 Wendy’s Chicken Nuggets all piled up. Those TWENTY chicken nuggets have less carbs than a serving of traditional lasagna. Now that’s something even notorious lasagna connoisseur, Garfield the Cat, would find that hard to swallow (pun intended).

Luckily, lasagna lovers (both human, and cartoon cat) no longer need to worry about carb-heavy pastas weighing them down. A once rather novel concept, utilizing vegetables to create healthier pasta substitutes is now commonplace. And we’re not just talking about spaghetti squash and zoodles either; the innovations in the space are truly exciting. Case in point, Natural Heaven Veggie Pasta Noodles.

Natural Heaven is a company that uses hearts of palm to make different pasta shapes, and their lasagna shaped “noodle” is a real winner. Handmade, the sheets of hearts of palm are thick, so they closely resemble actual pasta, and like Palmini’s and Zanzutto’s hearts of palm products, there are no other ingredients used, it’s just pure hearts of palm. It looks and functions like typical lasagna sheets, but has the nutrition of hearts of palm. An entire box of Natural Heaven’s lasagna shaped veggie pasta noodles only 70 calories (one serving is 25 cal), which is less than half of what’s in one serving of Barilla! This means you can have two entire boxes of Natural Heaven, and STILL have consumed less than you would if you had just one serving from the blue box.

Calories aside, and as noted above, this gluten-free product is also very low carb: it has just 4g carb per serving. But because each serving also contains 2g fiber, the net carb is just 2g too—which is a full 95% less than Barilla. Moving beyond the Barilla bashing (sorry, B!), Natural Heaven’s lasagna noodles are also a FREE FOOD on F-Factor. Because these “noodles” are just hearts of palm, which is a non-starchy vegetable, you can have as much as you’d like, and it still will be journaled as 0g carb. These lasagna sheets are also Keto and Diabetic friendly, vegan and non-GMO. Are they good enough for Garfield? That’s something the cartoon cat will have to decide that for himself, but here at the F-Factor office, without a doubt, this product gets 2 thumbs up.