Pizza study shows one big meal isn’t as bad for you if your nutrition

Most people would have enjoyed participating in this study by University of Bath researchers — especially because it involves eating a lot of pizza.

Researchers recruited 14 healthy participants and had them eat pizza on two occasions: one time until they were comfortably full, and the other until they couldn’t eat another bite. The results, as the eternal clickbait goes, will surprise you.

Researchers at the Centre for Nutrition, Exercise and Metabolism at the University of Bath analyzed the blood of participants before and after each meal.

In the ‘eat all you can’ group session, participants ate around 3000 kcal on average, roughly about one and a half large pizzas — about two times more than the other ‘normal meal’ group. However, this varied a lot, as some individuals were able to consume up to two and a half large pizzas in one go. Researchers were surprised to see that even when participants pushed way beyond their usual limits and doubled their calorie intake, they managed to keep the amount of nutrients in the bloodstream within the normal range, at least in the short term.

Essentially, this one overindulgent meal did not seem to make much of a difference, says lead researcher Aaron Hengist.