Alcohol is something we tend to over look when we think about weight management.  Like most things we eat or drink our body converts alcohol into usable energy or calories.  Unlike most things we eat or drink there isn't usually any other nutrition that comes with drinking alcohol.

How many calories are ther in alcohol?

A few weeks ago we mentioned that alcohol has about 7kcal (7 calories) or 29kJ per gram of energy locked up in it.  That's without even thinking about the sugars that are in some alcoholic drinks.  If you want to really dive in to the whole thing there's a great article here

How does that relate to what I drink?

Most people don't think about how many grams of alcohol are in the glass or wine or beer they're drinking around the Christmas Dinner table, or out at a bar.  So lets change that in to real world numbers.

Standard Drinks

A standard drink contains 10g of alcohol.

• 32ml (1 Shot ) of 40% Vodka

• 330ml (a Standard Can) of 4% Beer

• 100ml of 13% Wine 

Are all standard drinks.  They each contain about 10g of alcohol.

So the maths works out like this

10g Alcohol x 7kCal per gram = 70kCal

So  there are roughly 70kCal per standard drink.

Is that a lot of calories?

I like to think about calories in terms of what do I have to do to burn them off.  We talked about the amount of energy exercise burns a while ago.  

An 83Kg person walking at 5.5Km/h for 30 minutes would burn roughly 200Kcal or 6.67Kcal per minute.

So the maths for burning off ONE standard drink looks like this

70Kcal / 6.67Kcal per minute = 10.5 minutes

Or roughly

• 2 and a half times around a 400m track or

• around the square in Palmerston North One and a Quarter times

For each standard drink.