Cheap beer has anywhere from 4-6% alcohol. Whisky is usually around 40%. Let’s say someone drinks 6 12 oz. beers a day. Over time, this would prove to be unhealthy. Now, what is someone drinks 6 shots of Whisky(or any hard alcohol).
This would be the equivalent(more or less) of alcohol content with a lot less actual liquid.
Which is worse in the long run?
From a health standpoint, the matter to be considered is the amount of alcohol consumed, not the amount of water. Six beers or six shots of whiskey provide, as you say, more or less, the same amount of alcohol. If consumed in the same amount of time, the demand on the liver to process the alcohol is the same. And the inability to clear the body of the alcohol is about the same, too, meaning that your brain is pretty much equivalently impaired, regardless of the medium of imbibement. I suppose BAC (blood alcohol level) will rise slightly slower if you’re drinking a lot of water at the same time, i.e. beer, but my guess is that it won’t make a hell of a lot of difference, and your question of long term effects makes that question pretty much moot. Let’s see if QTM shows up and provides some clinical data. xo, C.
I suppose the beer drinker would be adding more calories to his diet per day, which could contribute to a weight problem.
I doubt that. The majority of the calories from booze come from the alcohol.
Huh? Really? Then why do several hard liqours advertise as having 0 calories? (Bacardi being the one that comes to mind right now.)
I think they probably advertise zero carbs. But that doesn’t mean zero calories. Alcohol is a high energy “food” and gets converted to sugar pretty quickly and that’s a carbohydrate. Maybe someone will come along pretty soon and do a quick organic update lesson for us to explain the energy pathway.
All distilled liquors are about the same, 69 calories per ounce. As for the Bacardi ads, they must be drunk.
So, what’s the comparative calorie content of beer?
I’ve heard that much of the ‘hangover’ effect of being drunk has to do with dehydration… (the kidneys needing a lot of water to flush alcohol byproducts out of the bloodstream) and thus will be heavier for someone who drinks hard liquor straight, without other beverages or eating food, than someone who drinks beer or otherwise provides a source of water to his body.
Is this true? If so… are there any long-term effects of regular dehydration through drinking??
A 12oz regular beer is about 150 calories. A light beer is about 100 calories.
Woah! So beer has a lot fewer calories, huh? I guess the alcohol does make a big difference. That makes sense, I guess, given how I managed to put on 30 pounds when I went off to college and drank a lot of hard alcohol–I always put it down to the weed and pizza, but I guess the vodka and rum must’ve played into it.
Extrapolating from this, a standard shot (1-1/4 ounce) would be about 83 calories, still less than a light beer and way less than a regular beer. So purely with regard to limiting calorie intake, the booze actually seems to be better.
Now, how many calories are in an olive? 
No, they definitely do advertise zero carbs, not zero calories.
Please, we’re ignoring the more important question here:
Six drinks is a lot?
This is the imporant question. :dubious:
I seem to have read that the carbs in beer (great, glorious beer) were the worst highest negatively impacting carbs you could consume. It recommended wine over beer. It had to do with the “liquid bread” aspect of beer.
I wonder if straight up Wild Turkey 101 has carbs more along the lines of alcohol than Coors Light.
I think I read this in the South Beach Diet book, but I really can’t rememeber. My Googlefu is weak, or I would give a shot trying to find it.
So it’s basically a semantics thing? They make people think they are drinking it guilt free, when it fact it just gets turned into sugar, and therefore a carb.
Isn’t that false advertising? I mean, yeah, in it’s alcohol form, it has no carbs, but there is no way to not get carbs from it if you ingest it.
Not really, fat gets turned into sugar before your body can use it as fuel.
Beer and wine lots of vitamins that distilled spirits don’t.
If you’re drinking yourself to death it’s going to take a lot longer on beer than it will on spirits. You could live a long time on nothing but beer…I don’t know if vitamin deficiency or protein deficiency would get you first. Scurvy or Kwashiorkor?
I still don’t see a verdict. Should I(theoreticaly) drink tons of whisky or massive tons of beer if I want to both be drunk and live to…65?