Blog

Liquid Lunch?

Alex
2008-10-31 18:05:00 UTC

I heard a rumour a while back, that a pint of Guinness is a meal in a glass. I’ve been wondering whether there’s any truth in this and so decided, for the sake of Science to look into it. Now, I needed something to compare it to, so I chose (I think reasonably enough) a can of baked beans.

Initially, it looks like a pint of Guinness does feed you up. 500g of Baked Beans (a pretty large meal) has a mighty 470 calories, but Guinness comes in at a respectable 160 calories per pint. Given that calories are meant to make you fat, surely this means that two pints of Guinness would provide a decent meal?

Then I noticed something. There’s only 7.7g of carbohydrate (about half a rice-cake’s worth) and no fat at all in a pint of Guinness. This compares to a mighty 105g of carbs, and 1.5g of fat in the beans. Now I know fat and carbohydrates are where the body gets energy from in food, so where’s the rest of the energy come from?

Well, I did a bit of research on this. The calorie content of food is determined simply by removing the water, burning the rest, then measuring the heat that comes off. What this means is that in alcoholic drinks, most of the calories come from burning the ethanol (Science term for drinkin’ alcohol) in them.

Fair enough, so you drink the Guinness, your body turns the alcohol into energy, then can use the energy as it would anything else in a meal (such as letting you run, or making you fat). The Guinness lunch is on.

Nope.

Thing is, your body isn’t a furnace, and the calories from alcohol don’t go to weight anywhere near as easily as normal calories.

So all these websites (and believe me, as I found out today, there are many) which harp on about the terrible calorie dangers of beer and wine, are being misleading. Alcohol, on its own, doesn’t actually provide much food value.

So, Guinness, meal in a glass? Well, it may provide a little energy, but it won’t really feed you, so no.

PS If anyone’s got the hard scientific facts (I don’t honestly care what dieting websites say) on the efficiency of alcohol absorption, I’d be fascinated to see them. It’s chaos out on the internet.

Comments

Cabalamat \| 2008-11-01 15:50:31 UTC So I can get pissed without putting on weight? I’ll drink to that!
Hugh \| 2008-11-02 11:02:00 UTC Fascinating stuff – I must admit, I’d bought the dieting website bollocks. So, two questions - 1) Are there other foodstuffs that have decptively high but unmetabolisable calorie content? I know that one of the reasons that high-fructose corn syrup is meant to be so bad is that it metabolises really quickly. 2) How come most heavy beer drinkers have a beer belly?
Fhtagn \| 2008-11-02 18:33:05 UTC I’d go out on a limb and say that it’s probably got something to do with heavy beer drinkers also being relatively sedentary and eating along with their booze.
pajh \| 2008-11-02 18:46:20 UTC Isn’t it to do with the fact that the calories in alcohol aren’t metabolized by the body (as Alex notes), so they just hang around as fat?
Alex \| 2008-11-02 21:50:47 UTC I must admit, it took quite some research to get any facts on this one, but the NIAAA (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcohol) notes that: An analysis of data collected from the first National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES I) found that although drinkers had significantly higher intakes of total calories than nondrinkers, drinkers were not more obese than nondrinkers. In fact, women drinkers had significantly lower body weight than nondrinkers. So I’m not just stating my opinion here. I do agree that many heavy drinkers tend to be fatter than non-drinkers, and there could be a wide variety of reasons for this, e.g. loss of willpower, alcohol increasing appetite, sedentriness etc. What I object to is numerous nutritional ‘experts’ saying an alcohol calorie is the same as any other calorie when it clearly isn’t.
Fhtagn \| 2008-11-03 10:48:13 UTC Isn’t it to do with the fact that the calories in alcohol aren’t metabolized by the body (as Alex notes), so they just hang around as fat? To rebuild ethanol to fat, the body would have to metabolise it completely and basicly start again from scratch. As an aside, what about the other nutritional content of beers, wines and ciders? To what extent do useful vitamins and the like hang around?
Steve \| 2008-11-06 11:26:24 UTC What happens, though, is that the body burns the alcohol for the energy, thereby allowing an equivalent amount of stored fat not to be burned (or similarly for the fat on that post-pub kebab).
Alex \| 2008-11-07 01:35:12 UTC Fhtagn: I might do something on other things you get from beer, though that’s an article in itself, there’s a whole long list of things in everything, and reseaching exactly what’s good and what isn’t would take a while. Steve: My research did seem to suggest that some of the stuff alcohol metabolizes into may be used as energy, but the science is unclear on how efficient this is as an energy source (as far as I know). The bottom line is that if you exchange carbohydrate calories for alcohol calories you’ll lose weight real quick. There is the problem of beer bellies, though that may just be a lifestyle thing, maybe people who don’t restrict their drinking much tend not to be restrict their eating much either? I’ve known a fair few very fat blokes who drink like fish, that said I’ve known a fair few very thin men who drink like fish too. The argument out there seems to be that if you’re very fat and you drink a lot, it’s clearly the alcohol doing it (as opposed to any other factors), whereas if you’re very thin and drink a lot then there must be some other factor stopping you from being fat. This argument appears to rely on the assumption that alcohol makes you fat.

Make a comment

Edit | Back

Cabalamat \| 2008-11-01 15:50:31 UTC So I can get pissed without putting on weight? I’ll drink to that!
Hugh \| 2008-11-02 11:02:00 UTC Fascinating stuff – I must admit, I’d bought the dieting website bollocks. So, two questions - 1) Are there other foodstuffs that have decptively high but unmetabolisable calorie content? I know that one of the reasons that high-fructose corn syrup is meant to be so bad is that it metabolises really quickly. 2) How come most heavy beer drinkers have a beer belly?
Fhtagn \| 2008-11-02 18:33:05 UTC I’d go out on a limb and say that it’s probably got something to do with heavy beer drinkers also being relatively sedentary and eating along with their booze.
pajh \| 2008-11-02 18:46:20 UTC Isn’t it to do with the fact that the calories in alcohol aren’t metabolized by the body (as Alex notes), so they just hang around as fat?
Alex \| 2008-11-02 21:50:47 UTC I must admit, it took quite some research to get any facts on this one, but the NIAAA (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcohol) notes that: An analysis of data collected from the first National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES I) found that although drinkers had significantly higher intakes of total calories than nondrinkers, drinkers were not more obese than nondrinkers. In fact, women drinkers had significantly lower body weight than nondrinkers. So I’m not just stating my opinion here. I do agree that many heavy drinkers tend to be fatter than non-drinkers, and there could be a wide variety of reasons for this, e.g. loss of willpower, alcohol increasing appetite, sedentriness etc. What I object to is numerous nutritional ‘experts’ saying an alcohol calorie is the same as any other calorie when it clearly isn’t.
Fhtagn \| 2008-11-03 10:48:13 UTC Isn’t it to do with the fact that the calories in alcohol aren’t metabolized by the body (as Alex notes), so they just hang around as fat? To rebuild ethanol to fat, the body would have to metabolise it completely and basicly start again from scratch. As an aside, what about the other nutritional content of beers, wines and ciders? To what extent do useful vitamins and the like hang around?
Steve \| 2008-11-06 11:26:24 UTC What happens, though, is that the body burns the alcohol for the energy, thereby allowing an equivalent amount of stored fat not to be burned (or similarly for the fat on that post-pub kebab).
Alex \| 2008-11-07 01:35:12 UTC Fhtagn: I might do something on other things you get from beer, though that’s an article in itself, there’s a whole long list of things in everything, and reseaching exactly what’s good and what isn’t would take a while. Steve: My research did seem to suggest that some of the stuff alcohol metabolizes into may be used as energy, but the science is unclear on how efficient this is as an energy source (as far as I know). The bottom line is that if you exchange carbohydrate calories for alcohol calories you’ll lose weight real quick. There is the problem of beer bellies, though that may just be a lifestyle thing, maybe people who don’t restrict their drinking much tend not to be restrict their eating much either? I’ve known a fair few very fat blokes who drink like fish, that said I’ve known a fair few very thin men who drink like fish too. The argument out there seems to be that if you’re very fat and you drink a lot, it’s clearly the alcohol doing it (as opposed to any other factors), whereas if you’re very thin and drink a lot then there must be some other factor stopping you from being fat. This argument appears to rely on the assumption that alcohol makes you fat.