You know that you should drink alcohol in moderation if you’re aiming for better wellness, but a new study has shown that alcohol makes up 16% of the calorie intake in an average drinker’s diet, with the calories increasing for young adults and men.
The calories in alcohol mainly come from sugar. It is recommended that you get no more that 5-15% of your total calories from solid fats or added sugars, and so the added sugar content of alcohol means that you may be over the recommended 15% limit. If you take sugary mixers out of the way, the calories in one serving of alcohol vary from 100 to 150 calories roughly. One 12-ounce beer, for example, is about 150 calories, whereas a 5-ounce glass of wine is about 120 calories and just a 1.5 ounce of liquor (or a shot) still amounts to 100 calories.
Researchers evaluated the data from adults over age 20 who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2007 to 2010. They surveyed the amount of calories consumed from beer, wine, liquor or mixed drinks by adults in the last 24 hours. The results showed that men get three times the amount of daily calories from alcohol as women, adding up to 150 and 50 average calories a day respectively. This went up to 174 calories a day for young men aged 20 to 29 and down to 33 calories per day for women over the age of 60.
When it came to types of alcohol, beer was the drink of choice for men as it accounted for 103 of the 150 alcohol calories drunk per day by men, whereas beer, wine and liquor contributed nearly equally to women’s daily alcohol calories count. In terms of other categories, such as race or ethnicity, there was no difference that researchers could discern but they did discover that women with higher incomes drank more than those with lower incomes.
Therefore, the study showed that most men and women fall within the recommended guidelines for alcohol consumption, as it is advised that men should only drink two drinks per day and women should only drink one. However, 19% of men and 12% of women do not drink in moderation, but put their wellbeing at risk by exceeding them.
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