We do love our pizza -- all 100 acres of it that we eat every day here in the United States. That's 3 billion pizzas, or 46 slices (23 pounds), of the stuff for every person in the country, every year. (H/t to The Week for gathering those stats in 2011.) Every second, 350 slices are sold. And if you're wondering about our taste in toppings, well, Americans consume 251.7 million pounds of pepperoni annually.
Now, as pizza's biggest day, Super Bowl Sunday, approaches (70 percent of viewers of The Big Game say they'll have at least one slice), come researchers telling us we're feeding our children too much pizza, as my colleague Roberto Ferdman reports on Wonkblog.
Next: A study saying we let them play too many video games.
This is, of course, serious. There's little that is healthful for you in pizza, which, as I'm sure you know, is loaded with fat and salt. But the study of 11,000 kids and adolescents also turned up the news that pizza is the second-leading source of calories in the diets of America's children and that 20 percent of people aged 2 to 19 eat pizza on any given day. When they do eat pizza, children consume about 400 calories worth and teenagers chow down about 600 calories.
I could go on with the bad news, but you can just read Roberto's post here. Look for a small silver lining at the end.
While I call Domino's.
