Why Doesn’t Your Bud Light Have Nutritional Information?
Depending on how many you throw back, you may have wondered why neither your Maker’s Mark nor your Pinot Grigio nor your Natty Ice have their calories listed. Maybe you’ve just accepted that’s the way it is, or maybe you thought about it and then got too sloshed to remember to look up why. But that may change if one Brit has her way.
Both America and Britain don’t force (most) alcohol products to have nutrition labels, and while we’re not sure about our friends across the pond, the reason we don’t have such labels is, surprisingly, because of Prohibition. Since alcohol stopped being managed by the FDA after that dark time, it is no longer under the FDA’s rules about labeling, though there are some very confusing caveats you can read all about here.
But that is where we are as a nation and it is not helping us lose weight. By one estimate, drinkers are getting 10% of their daily calories from beer, wine or liquor. And some believe, including “public health expert” Fiona Sim, that if that xxx amount of calories was staring at you from the side of the bottle, even with blurry eyes you may reconsider popping open another one.
She refers to invisible calories and how, when we’re concerned about driving, hangovers and partying, we may not even think about how much we’re adding to our already substantial beer bellies. And she is asking for a change in policy to finally slap that info on everything.
But until then, you can always look up the calories on the beer you’re drinking. Yes, a couple drinks a day may be good for you, but that doesn’t mean there still aren’t calories in those drinks that you may want to remove from somewhere else. And if you can’t find where else to take them out, you may want to consider switching to a couple glasses of soda water every night.