In response to a question I was asked, I thought I would write a series of articles about the question… how many calories in alcoholic drinks. It seemed like a simple task at a time. The simplest answer to the question is … the calorific count of ethanol is 7 calories per gram. That’s the easy part. But when people are searching for the calories in any product they want to know how it is going to affect them.
- Is it going to make them put on weight?
- Should they be consuming any alcohol calories during a diet?
- If they are going to have a couple of drinks anyway, what is going to be the least damaging alcohol drink calories that they can consume?
There are those who say, a drink is a drink is a drink, and no matter what you drink it’s going to act the same way, in terms of your calorie intake, weight loss or gain, etc. Then, there are others who say that it all depends on the type of alcohol that you are drinking … wine, beer, or spirits. This makes a little bit more sense because there are different ingredients in each that can affect the overall calorie count.
For example, let’s take a look at the calories in a few different types of beer. As we’ve seen before, when it comes to calories, alcohol in its purest form has about 7 calories per gram. But, we don’t drink alcohol in its purest form … very dangerous stuff! The calories in 100 mL Guinness draught is 35.2 with an alcohol content of 4.1 to 4.3%. The calorie count in 100 mL of Heineken is 35.3 with an alcohol content of 5%. 100 mL of regular Miller contains 43 calories and an alcohol content of 4.7%.[i] These figures have quite large discrepancies, so there are obviously other factors that need to be taken into account such as the amount of carbohydrates which are involved.
There’s a lot of research that has been done into how alcohol stimulates hunger. But even that research is fairly limited, looking at it in terms of its effect on already obese people, its effect in increasing appetite when drank just before or during a meal, or its effect on heavy drinking. The figures are not so clear when we’re looking at a normal healthy drinking, moderate drinking.
From everything that I have read, it seems to be fairly clear that the body cannot store alcohol, it must break it down and burn it up straight away. It does this through the use of alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH). This is an enzyme that metabolises the alcohol into another toxic substance … acetaldehyde. Another enzyme then comes into the picture … aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH). What comes out the other end is acetate, which is a chemical that the body produces in order to extract the energy for the food that you eat. Women produce less alcohol dehydrogenase than men. But, but because men produce more of this enzyme than women, and because ADH is an irritant, men should only drink after they’ve had something to eat, especially if they have been suffering any form of stomach problems.
Over the next few articles I want to look at the different types of alcohol to try to figure out how calories from alcohol are really going to affect you. But, from my research so far, it seems that small amounts of alcoholic calories are not going to affect you when it comes to weight gain or weight loss. It’s the extra food that you eat when you’re drinking that may account for a jump in the kilos.
[i] Calorie Guide from Guinness http://www2.guinness.com/en-ie/food-calorie-guide.html