A few weeks ago I met a waitress from the Pickled Onion at a Bachelorette party. We'd just dressed the bride-to-be in pirate accessories and introduced her to her date for the night – a life-size cardboard cut-out of Captain Jack Sparrow. We then donned our own eye-patches, cracked open a bottle of champagne and settled down to chat. If ever there was a more random and inappropriate time for a serious conversation on nutrition, this was it. However, given the opportunity I couldn't help but ask her a multitude of questions.

As the Pickled Onion is such a favourite with Bermudians and tourists alike, I was curious to see if there were any major differences in menu choices between cultures. I guess unsurprisingly, as Bermuda is an expensive holiday destination and as most of our visitors are from westernised cultures, it seems that fast-food preferences follow the same trends. However, it's apparently only Bermudians who like to order pizza with a side mayo.

Now seriously, come on! We order pizza and then dip it in mayo? Are we sure we don't want to deep-fry it first? Add some calamari? Maybe onion rings? Here we are mid-obesity epidemic and now we need to add the pizza/mayo combo to our list of dietary disasters.

Of course, although I spend my week days battling the impact of Mac n' Cheese on Bermuda's public, at least I get a little solace at home. Or do I? I did come home the other day to find my husband eating pizza. Poor him, it's not that I have a problem with the occasional pizza, but him saying "it's not that bad for you" was a little like showing a red flag to a bull.

Ever on my mission, I promptly pulled the pizza box out of the trash and made him sit through a lesson on Pizza: The Contents. Unfortunately for him, he'd chosen one of the worst offenders – the DiGiorno 4 meat pizza. Now in a quest to minimise the calorific impact of fast food, manufacturers list the nutritional information by serving size. So although this was a normal sized-pizza, the figures were specific to one slice, or one fifth, of the pizza. However, more realistically, eating the whole thing amounted to the following:

• 1,950 calories (The average DAILY recommendation is to consume 2,000 calories)

l 100g fat

l 40g saturated fat

l 250mg cholesterol

l 5,050mg sodium (This is not a spelling error. This is genuinely over four times your daily quota for sodium), and

l 25g of sugar (that's five teaspoons)

As if that weren't bad enough, the long, long list of ingredients was also very suspect. In fact the mystery meat on the pizza even contained BHT. BHT is an artificial antioxidant that's also widely used in jet fuel, rubber and petroleum. If I haven't put you off yet, consider this: BHT is also used in embalming fluid.

As I've mentioned, pizza as an occasional treat is ok – especially if you can avoid the BHT – but we really have to prevent it being an easy quick-fix option for dinner. So, to continue along my theme of the last few weeks, here's yet another idea for a healthy, quick dinner option.

Many of the grocery stores here now stock the fresh Covent Garden soups. These are about as close to home-made as you are going to get, with the bonus of a clear, colour coded food labelling system. All the products are labelled as either green, orange or red for total fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt content. As with many brands, there is a diversity of healthy and unhealthy options within the product range. The bonus with Covent Garden, is that it's easy to see which is which.

There are a couple of Covent Garden soups I wouldn't recommend. The Thai Chicken and the Broccoli & Stilton are for example, both high in saturated fat. Not as high as pizza dipped in mayo mind you, but relatively speaking. However the Three Bean & Lentil soup pictured here is excellent. It contains only 0.3g of saturated fat, contains 11g of protein (that's equivalent to nearly two eggs) and has a great 5.7g of fibre per half carton. The Moroccan Spiced Chick Pea, Minestrone and Plum, Tomato & Basil are also good.

As many of the soups do, the Plum, Tomato & Basil soup also makes an excellent sauce for fish or chicken – useful if you have a spare half carton kicking around the fridge. A quick word of caution however – the tomato soup does contain 14.7g of sugar (3.5 teaspoons) which is more than I'd normally recommend, so whilst I would put this in the "generally healthy" bracket, go easy. To be honest though, after my conversations with the waitress, as long as you're not eating pizza dipped in mayo, this is a step in the right direction!

The advice given in this article is not intended to replace medical advice, but to complement it. Always consult your GP if you have any health concerns. Catherine Burns is a fully qualified Nutritional Therapist.