When ordering a pizza, you may want to keep in mind these considerations. The percentage changes in how much pizza you will consume, change drastically even if you just reduce the size of the pizza on a couple inches.
That’s a Big Difference
For example, a typical Extra-Large (16″) Pepperoni pizza has about 320 calories and 700mg of sodium per slice. But if you just reduce the size by 2″ and order a 14″ pizza, the calories drop by about 25% (225 calories and 500mg sodium).
Nearly Half the Calories
Let’s go a step further and order a 12″ pizza, That will bring down the calories to about 120 and the sodium to about 400mg. That’s almost a 45% reduction in calories from our original 16″ pizza.
Why is there Such a Big Difference?
It’s all in the math. The area of a pizza is equal to π times the radius squared. Remember from school geometry, πr2? Because the radius of the pizza is squared (multiplied by itself), the surface area of the pizza goes up by much more that two times. For example, one 18″ pizza has more pizza that two 12″ pizzas. 18″ pizza = π(18/2)2 = 254″2 and the 12″ pizza = π(12/2)2 = 226″2
