What Should Be Indicated on Food Labels About Alcoholic Beverages
If you want to incorporate beer into a healthy diet , it’s hard to get by without knowing exactly what’s in that beer. Luckily, beer maker Guinness (as well as Captain Morgan, Johnny Walker, and others) announced that they would start putting nutritional information on their labels . So what’s in the drink?
By the way, some other brands post nutritional information for their drinks on the Internet. So while some brands are still a mystery, others have this information, just a few steps away from Google. (Here’s a comparison of popular beers , for example.) Reading these labels will tell you the nutritional value of your favorite drinks after work:
- Alcohol has 7 calories per gram. Compare this to 9 for fat and 4 for protein or carbohydrates. (Contrary to popular myth, alcohol is not carbohydrates.)
- Almost all of the calories in hard liquor come from alcohol. For example, each of Johnny Walker ‘s 105 calories comes from 15 grams of alcohol. The same goes for rum, vodka and other traditional spirits. The only difference between the two is that the higher the persistence, the higher the calorie content.
- This does not apply to liqueurs with added ingredients. For example, Bailey’s has cream, so the shot contains 10.6 grams of carbs, 1.3 grams of protein, and 6.2 grams of fat. (That’s a lot more carbs than cream usually contains , which makes me wonder if Bailey’s ingredient label is accurate. If sugar is added, that would explain that.) This is in addition to alcohol, adding up to 142 calories.
- Dark beers are not necessarily higher in calories than light-colored beers , mainly because their calorie content is more influenced by alcohol content than other ingredients. A 12-ounce can of Guinness (at 4.2% alcohol by volume) contains 128 calories , while the same amount of Budweiser at 5% alcohol is 145 calories . Both beers contain 10.6 grams of carbohydrates and a similarly small amount of protein (1.1 and 1.3 grams, respectively).
Armed with this information, you can hopefully be able to make smart choices about what you want to put into your body. Calories are chargeable, but they shouldn’t be a mystery.
Know Your Drink | Diageo via Wall Street Journal