Not: I don’t drink alcoholic beverages, nor can I get any alcoholic beverages in the near future.
My friend told me alcoholic beverages don’t have nutrition facts labelled on them. We’re wondering why that is.
Obviously, nutrition isn’t the biggest thing on your mind when you’re drinking, but then nutrition facts are listed on just about everything else you can ingest even gum, which most people spit out.
The FDA offers exemptions for certain types of food, and some types of foods are regulated by a different agency (meat, for example.)
I don’t know why alcohol in specific is exempted from these labeling requirements, my guess would be it isn’t considered “Food” and thus isn’t subject to FDA regulations governing food labeling.
Incidentally, when I was on Weight Watchers, we were told that a bottle of beer had about the same number of “points” (based on a weird formula involving calories, fat, and fiber) as a can of Coke. IIRC, shots of liquor were about the same.
A can of coke and a bottle of beer should have roughly the same amount of fat and fiber - none. Some esoteric beer might have one or both, but what were you expecting exactly? They’re both carbohydrate based beverages except one had a bit of the carbs converted into a bit of alcohol.
Er? :dubious: Wasn’t really expecting anything. I was mentioning the comparison between the bottle of alcohol and the can of coke since the OP sounded like they might be mildly interested in the nutritional content of the drink. The fact that both Coca-Cola and Shiner Bock don’t contain any fiber or fat doesn’t mean a different formula gets used to figure out their Weight Watcher’s point value, it just means 0’s get dropped in the appropriate places in the formula.
Actually, some booze does have labels- if they make dietary claims, such as “low in carbs” or whatever. Otherwise, the manufactor’s lobby has been pretty good at getting Congress to go along with “beer is beer”, and if one needs to know the calories and whatnot of “beer” one can look it up.
But if there’s sugar in the gum, you still ingest that sugar. I’m not sure what else is ingested, but the gum is certainly a different substance when you’re done chewing it, so there must be something, I would think.
But the yeast use that sugar for energy and alcohol is the ‘waste’ product, along with CO2.
When something gets energy from food, that food has less energy left. Also CO2 production indicated a net loss of energy. So it would seem that the conversion from sugar to alcohol should produce a lower calorie drink.
Well the only way something can become a higher calorie drink is if something improves digestability or energy is added. However, alcohol is a very dense way of transporting energy (digestability of alcohol is debatable) at about 7 kcal a gram, which almost twice the 4 kcal a gram of sugar. So although alcohol production might be a loss of energy, people normally do not drink the starting product so this fact isn’t very useful for calorie comparison.
Alcohol labels aren’t governed by the FDA, they are governed by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, otherwise known as TTB (formerly BATF - after 9/11 the regulation and taxation of alcohol and tobacco switched over to the Treasury Dept, while the smuggling of alchol and tobacco as well as explosives and firearms now fall under the Justice Dept. As far as I know it is still named ATF, or ATF&E, or something like that.)
I can’t really speak for beer or spirits, but I can tell you that to include such information on a wine label would be an operational nightmare and would indeed end up becoming quite expensive. Labels must be approved by TTB and are generally printed before a wine is even ready to bottle. Wine can be a fickle beverage while being made, so what works to get one blend right might not work to get the next blend right, requiring different ingredients and/or processes for essentially the same product (say a CA Merlot.) - And for that very reason there are some tolerances granted on wine labels that allows bottling without resubmitting for approval.
I won’t go into all of the details, but I challenge Mr. Adams to spend a couple of months (it actually takes longer than that though) dealing with the processes required to compliantly label a bottle (or a few million) of wine and then consider the implications of adding what could potentially be an ever changing list of ingredients to it. It’s giving me a headache just thinking about it. Something tells me he might reconsider the ‘expense excuse’ as being ‘ridiculous.’
And regarding the linked article, I certainly don’t know about chicken hearts in Bud, but I hope it’s not true. It would be a terrible waste of otherwise wonderfully tasty chicken hearts.
Well hard cider seems to be the perfect example, what would be the calorie difference between apple cider and hard cider, which I assume is the same thing except for fermentation
No. It’s because the booze biz is overrun with whiny little babies who cry and scream like toddlers whenever the government tries to make them play by the same rules everyone else does.
In other news, that is a pretty damn pointless statement.
Actually, the “booze biz” DID try to play by the same rules, but the FDA wouldn’t allow nutritional labels because it might imply that oops…maybe alcohol isn’t 100% bad after all??