A couple of drinks at a party??
Q. How big a factor is drinking alcohol in weight gain?
A. Calories from alcohol do not seem to be a major factor in weight gain. On the contrary, drinking may even cause weight loss. This is the consensus of a high-powered 1993 scientific workshop on alcohol and calories sponsored in part by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
As you may know, most of the calories in beer and wine come from the ethyl alcohol. The remainder are mainly carbohydrate calories-- an 8 ounce glass of table wine has 204 calories, 163 come from ethanol, 40 from carbohydrates, 1 from protein. A 12 ounce can of regular beer has 150 calories, 93 come from ethanol, 55 from carbohydrates, and 2 from protein. On the other hand, all the 70 calories in an ounce of scotch, bourbon or whiskey come from ethanol.
The total number of calories in these drinks, particularly beer and wine, is obviously high. A glass of wine, for instance, has nearly as many calories as a small bag of M&M's. Yet, based on an extensive review of animal and human studies, the consensus of the workshop scientists was that alcohol doesn't make us fat. Here, are three of the more interesting human studies they considered.
Study one. This classic study was conducted in a hospital setting on 13 men and one woman. Over a 16 day period, 11 of the men, and the one woman, had ethanol substituted for half of their carbohydrate calories. And they lost an average of two pounds each. The remaining two men had 2000 ethanol calories added to their normal daily diet. They gained less than one-half pound each. (In contrast, when one of these men later had the same numbers of calories from chocolate added to his normal diet, he gained six pounds during a similar period.) Furthermore, when subjects substituted alcohol calories for food calories, they all lost weight.
Study two. Thirty-seven women added one ounce of alcohol a day to an otherwise balanced diet. Over the three months of the study, 15 of the women needed additional food calories to maintain body weight. The remaining 22 showed no weight change from drinking the alcohol or needed fewer food calories to maintain weight.
Study three. A long term study of more than 89,000 men and 48,000 women revealed a strong inverse relationship between alcohol intake and weight (the higher the drinking level the lower the weight). But this was only found among the women. The men showed no association. Also of interest, drinking had nothing to do with the type and quantity of food the men ate.
The basic implications of these and other studies are: Drinkers are no more likely to be obese than non-drinkers. Alcohol calories do not contribute to body weight. And large amounts of alcohol seem to interfere with the ability of food to maintain body weight.
Why this is so isn't well understood. One theory is that the ethanol "turns on" some unidentified "energy-wasting" mechanisms in the body. This "wasting" converts the bulk of the ethanol to carbon dioxide. As a result, relatively few ethanol calories are left. So without ethanol calories, and only carbohydrate calories to worry about, you would have to drink 6 glasses of wine, or 4 cans of beer, to consume the calories in the small bag of M&M's. Theoretically, hard liquor would have no fat producing calories.
All this is not promoting alcohol as a dietary technique. And it's surely not advocating drinking. It's well understood that the physical and psychological problems associated with overdosing on alcohol can be devastating to the individual and the family. The point is, there is little evidence that drinking itself contributes to weight gain.
Patrick J. Bird, Ph.D.
Keeping Fit
Column 379
1994