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The Study Claiming That Blotting Your Pizza Saves Calories Might Have Been A Marketing Campaign

True or false: Blotting your pizza before eating will save you a ton of calories, prevent you from gaining weight, and make your life perfect.

Maybe you've seen a few articles about how blotting your pizza with a paper towel can eliminate 4.5 grams of fat and 41 calories.

Which means, as this infographic shows, that if you dab every slice you eat for a year, you'll eat 6,600 fewer calories than if you didn't dab.

*RECORD SCRATCH*

Wait, what?

All you have to do is dab every slice you eat for a year and you're down 2 pounds?

It turns out that the data comes from a study done at least 15 years ago by Georgia-Pacific Health Smart Institute.

The study is quoted as having found that up to 17% of the pie's saturated fat can be removed by way of the "pizza pat," the process of laying a folded paper towel atop a slice and patting it before flipping it and patting again.

Georgia-Pacific Health Smart Institute is an initiative of Georgia-Pacific, which makes paper products like the paper towel you might blot your pizza with.

So, wait, could this all have been a marketing campaign for paper towels?

Since the study is no longer available, we couldn't verify its claims or ask an expert to do so. But we did ask the nutritionist cited in the infographic her thoughts.

If you're a devoted blotter, it may reassure you that in 2013 the Food Network show Food Detectives shared similar results.

Since the science is iffy, we put it to you:

Thumbnails via Tojosan/Creative Commons and Lucas Richarz/Creative Commons