What rice does for Chinese food, pasta does for Italian. It cuts the fat.

Order an entree that’s largely made of a pasta like spaghetti or linguini and you’ll. likely stay below the 30 percent of calories from fat that many health authorities recommend. (We say 20 percent.)

It can be a tomato sauce or a clam sauce. You can have meat sauce or meatballs. Even adding sausage only bumps the fat to about 35 percent of calories. The only exception is a cream-and-cheese-based sauce like an “Alfredo.”

The same holds true for artery-clogging saturated fat. Many experts recommend keeping sat fat below ten percent of calories. (We say seven percent.) Except for Fettuccini Alfredo, no spaghetti-based dish topped nine percent. That’s not nearly as low as Chinese food, but it puts standard American fare to shame.

So why not add a side order of spaghetti with tomato sauce to fattier dishes like Eggplant Parmigiana? Many restaurants do. (And we did, too, in ranking all the non-pasta entrees.) Sure enough, add a typical 1 1/2-cup portion of spaghetti to the eggplant and you cut its fat from about 60 percent of calories to about 45.

Better yet, order at least one spaghetti-based dish for every meat-or-cheese-based entree and divvy up the fat–excuse us, the food–among the diners.