The Pizza Blot

Do you blot away the grease squirming around on top of the pizza so conveniently dropped off at your front door by the nice young man driving a weird-looking Volkswagen with a pizza sign on top?

You really should. You could lose weight – granted it’s not much of a weight loss over the course of a year, but it could be healthy and less artery-clogging to boot.

I was watching a 2009 episode of Food Detectives on The Cooking Channel, where they replicated a Popular Science experiment and proved unequivocally that pizza using poor quality cheese releases a lot of oil. Why? Because the cheap cheese used by fast-food pizza restaurants contains a lot of oil – more oil in the cheese, more oil on top of the pizza. Makes sense.

Okay, so they cooked 20-inch pizzas and cut each into 8 slices. Each slice averaged 3.5 grams of fat blotted off (averaging about 35 calories).

Then they shared their math: Two slices a week (the national average) adds up to 104 slices a year. That's two cups of grease or 3,640 calories. And that's an extra pound gained each year.

As for the paper napkins they used for blotting the greasy pizza, they were weighed before and after blotting.

Blot, blot, blot … helps prevent heart clot, clot, clot.