Imagine the tastiest food you have ever eaten and then multiply it by three, now you know what pizza tastes like. A round, flatbread with colorful toppings that everybody seems to love and adore. But like any other food out there, it comes with the worrying question of how many calories does a slice of pizza have? This article will answer that question, along with other pizza and calorie trivia.
The Main Ingredients of a Pizza
You can’t call the pizza a “pizza” without its main ingredients and delicious toppings. Since its birth in Italy, the pizza has been busy increasing and making its roots to different continents and countries, paving the creation of even more bizarre and delectable looking pizzas that you can only dream of.
Before we begin unearthing the mystery of ‘how many calories does a slice of pizza have’, we need to examine first the anatomy of a pizza and what makes it one of the most beloved food in the world today. We are just going to focus on the main ones.
- The Pizza Dough
The dough is the very foundation of a pizza. It is where the tasty toppings will be. It may be plain and simple looking on the outside but is really made of various ingredients like flour, yeast, water, salt, and olive oil. Most of the time, it is white and is baked or cooked while the toppings are being prepared.
In modern times, the crust of the pizza comes in different exciting shapes and sizes. One modern technique used by well-known pizza makers is stuffing the crust with a generous amount of cheese to make it even more delightful for consumption. - Vegetables and herbs
Medical practitioners will surely argue about the harm of eating pizza. They surely have a point because of the calories you can get from eating pizza, but that can easily be countered by its healthy ingredients, namely tomatoes, onions, and bell peppers. If you have health problems and are concerned about how many calories a slice of pizza has, you may want to cut some calories by choosing a vegetable-only pizza topping. Yes, that kind of pure, healthy version of pizza exists. - Tomato sauce
The ingredient that gives the pizza its attractive and “eat me, I’m delicious” look. Experts say that red is one of the more alluring colors, which means that your brain will register it as appealing if you see that particular color in food or dress. Such is the case of a pizza, but pizza doesn’t only look good, its marvelous flavor backs it up. - Meat, sausage, or bacon
The rule of three in pizza language is meat, sausage, and bacon. Any of them can exist in the pizza without the two others and can still bring out that rich flavor that only a pizza can bring. These ingredients are not for the health-conscious. You have been warned. - Cheese
Imagine if a human doesn’t have a heart. A human without a heart is a dead human: no life, no happiness, no color. The same happens to a pizza without cheese; it becomes spiritless. The point is, the cheese is the core of all the other ingredients. Without the cheese, the other components wouldn’t taste as good as they should be. They would not properly function without that unique cheesy goodness that cheese can bring.
A Slice is All You Need
When all those ingredients mentioned above are formed in one delicious chunk of circular deliciousness, they also combine their individual calories. If you want to look over your health and don’t want to be bothered by the question ‘how many calories does a slice of pizza have’ anymore, you need to check your facts. Here is the checklist of calorie counts from the different pizza types from the highest to the lowest.
- Meat Pizza: 400 calories
- Meat and Veggies Pizza: 330 calories
- Sicilian Pizza: 320 calories
- Extra Cheese Pizza: 310 calories
- Pepperoni Pizza: 298 calories
- Hawaiian Pizza: 294 calories
- Cheese Pizza: 272 calories
- Veggie Pizza: 260 calories
- Margherita Pizza: 250 calories
- Thin-Crust Pizza: 192 calories
How Your Body Reacts to a Slice of Pizza
It’s not an exaggeration to say that pizza may be the most universally loved food of all time, but before we glorify this tasty creation, we need to look first at what happens to our body when we consume a slice of pizza.
- The first bite of pizza is always mind-blowing, which triggers the pleasure center of our brain so that the next bite wouldn’t be as knock out as the first.
- The taste of pizza will then trigger your mouth to water and produce digestive juices. These enzymes will then break down the pizza and turn it into glucose, which fuels our body.
- The carbohydrates from your pizza then make a grand entrance into the bloodstream, and the body converts it into energy. The unwanted effect is that, if there’s a lot of sugar, some will be sent to the liver and will be turned to fat.
- After 30 minutes of consuming your first share of pizza, the unhealthy fats will go to the bloodstream. The danger of these unhealthy fats is that if you eat pizza all the time and don’t do a lot of locomotion, it will clog your arteries and possibly cause heart problems.
Pizza: Good or Bad
It turns out that pizza can be quite delicious and healthy at the same time if prepared with the right ingredients.
Many fast-food pizza varieties out there have increased amounts of calories, fat, salt, and other God-knows-what unhealthy foodstuffs. So, why not make your version of a pizza, practice portion control, and choose healthy products and toppings? That can work if you just put your mind into it. Here’s how to learn more about calories on pizza.
Conclusion
Not many people are aware of this, but the key to a healthy lifestyle is not knowing ‘how many calories does a slice of pizza have’ or ‘what type of pizza has the most calories’, but eating in moderation. Just a simple control of what you put in your mouth daily can make life less troublesome.