Home › Posts tagged calories

calories

Dieting and Beer

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

The first thing that a dieter needs to know about beer is: beer is food. It is not a beverage you can guzzle down and not feel the caloric content of. Darker beers are, naturally, higher in caloric content than lighter beers. So if you are trying to lose some weight, start by lightening your brews – and limiting them. Mixing dieting and beer drinking is simply a question of where you put your priorities. Suddenly, a hamburger and a pint aren’t going to mix anymore.

Let’s look at the hard facts – your average beer has about 148 calories per twelve ounces. Assuming your average daily caloric intake is 2,ooo calories, this means that a couple of beers already counts as one of your meals for the day. I recommend skipping dinner.

If you are drinking darker beers, you may be in even more trouble. Some stouts rank as high as 220 calories. Compared to a light beer’s caloric content of 70-99. Surprisingly, Guinness is one exception to the dark calorie rule. Guinness ranks at a moderate 125 calories for a 12 ounce pub draught, whereas many stouts and porters are around 210. If you are not sure about how your favorite beer ranks, you can contact them and find out. Sadly, this is one area where microbrews are outperformed by the bigger brewing companies. Those microbrews just have so much flavor – and it shows in their caloric breakdown.

Now for a word about dieting. Dieting, as most people consider it, is not the healthiest way to lose weight. Suddenly changing your eating (& drinking) routine, then reverting back to the old ways a couple weeks, or a month later, is not as effective as permanent and slight changes to your routine. These changes become your permanent diet – not your two-week miracle diet. They are changes you can live with – for good. Rules are made to be broken. Most people are more likely to listen to suggestions to themselves than follow rules they make for themselves.

There are a lot of “beer diet” books going around right now. I dare say that many of these books are using the word beer just to get people to buy them. Beer has carbs, it has calories, and must be considered carefully if it is to be taken during a period of effective dieting. While beer is nutritious, it would be ludicrous to assume in any way that a beer only diet could be healthy or effective. One of the biggest difficulties facing the dieting beer drinker is just knowing which beers are high in calories, and just how much starch and carbohydrates are in each variety of beer. Fortunately, there are many calorie counter websites and books out there, and if you are unsure about the nutritional information of the beer you are drinking, it is advised to call the brewery during business hours and find out.

Being well informed is the best weapon you have in your arsenal if you want to drink beer and diet to lose weight. Adjusting your beer diet towards lighter beers with less body is an important step. Realizing that beer is food is another important step in configuring your diet. Moderation and daily routine changes are key to becoming who you want to be.

A Nutritional Guide to Beer

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Beer has always been a source of nutrition for it’s drinkers.  The most common problem people have with beer is that it is too nutritious to be considered a mere beverage.  Beer is food, and must be considered as such in order for the avid beer drinker to maintain health.  Too much beer – just like too much food – and not enough exercise has been the downfall of many a beer fan.  The body of a beer has a great effect on it’s nutritional value, and so does the yeast used in the brewing.  First let’s look at some of the overall nutritional qualities of beer.

The most nutritious aspect of beer drinking is probably the least considered – not the malt, hops, barley, but the yeast.  Yeast sediment is uncommon in most commercially produced beers, but that doesn’t mean that the yeast isn’t there – it is.  Floating unseen in the body of the beer are the remnants of the magical creature that transforms sugar into alcohol.  Yeast remains accountable for the addition of B-complex vitamins, protein, and minerals to brews.  Most commercially produced beers have the yeast sediment rigorously strained out of it – but it is still there.  In “real ale” “live ale”, or “cask-conditioned” ales, you are likely to find a higher yeast content, as the beer is less processed.

One testament to the nutritious qualities of beer is the use of beer in certain food dishes.  In Belgium, a land where beers are many and varied, they make a dish called Carbonnade.  This is basically a beef stew, but it is made with beer instead of water!  Irish stew is another likely candidate to be spiked.  Beer is also found occasionally as a marinade (for kielbasas), as a moisturizer (beer can chicken), and is even claimed by some to tenderize meat.  I have even seen beer-based desserts on the menu at mid-scale restaurants – the most common being the Guinness Ice Cream Float.  Furthermore, the study “Effect of beer, yeast-fermented glucose, and ethanol on pancreatic enzyme secretion in healthy human subjects” conducted in 1996 suggests that the non-alcoholic part of beer, yeast fermented glucose, stimulates pancreatic enzyme production, helping the body to absorb nutrients from it’s meal.  It is likely that beer is not only nutritious, but also helps the body process other nutrients in the digestive system as well. 

Beer for desert, anyone?

To understand how beer can fit into our dietary regimens, let’s look at the nutritional qualities of a few types of beer.  Different makes of beer have different nutritional values, so we’ll have to be specific here.  We are going to select three champions from three different fields of brewing.  For the dark beers, we will choose Guinness as a popular representative.  For the amber ales, New Belgium’s Fat Tire, and for the Pale ales, Sierra Nevada’s Wheat Beer. 

Twelve ounces of Guinness have roughly the same nutritional value as a baked sweet potato with no toppings: Sodium 20 mg. vs. 22 mg. in potato, carbs 10g vs. 12.4 g. in potato, and 40 calories worth of carbs vs. the 50 cal. sweet potato.  Guinness also has 82 cal. from alcohol (making a total of 122 cal.), and 0 g. fat, whereas the potato has 5 cal. of protein and 1 g. of fat.  As we can see, if you add a little butter, salt and pepper to the potato and the extra 4 ounces to the pint, they will come out roughly the same (although the potato will probably have more fat; the Guinness is actually quite lean).  This is a good way to look at the number of drinks you are having – a pint of Guinness is about like eating a lightly topped baked potato – but quite a bit tastier after the 2nd one.

New Belgium’s Fat Tire Amber Ale is well known for it’s full body and malty flavor.  All of that flavor does add up to more slightly more calories and carbs.  Fat Tire has a total of 155 calories and 14.7 grams worth of carbs, bringing it’s nutritional value up to that of a slightly larger baked sweet potato.  The good news is that you can easily work those extra calories off by bicycling to the bar and back!

Sierra Nevada’s Wheat Beer is a light-tasting alternative as far as beers go – but the flavors of this beer add up to more calories than Guinness!  With the same sodium content(20 mg.), and also more carbs (13.1g.), more protein (1.6g vs. Guinness 1g.), and more Alcohol 95 cal. than Guinness.  This goes to show that color isn’t everything.  Although Guinness is certainly the lightest beer, in terms of calories, from the field of Stouts.

We can see that different beers have a wide variety of nutritional values.  The one guideline I can suggest to figure out the nutritional qualities of your beer is that the more maltiness and body of the ale, the higher the caloric content is likely to be.  Keep all this in mind and keep a tally of the potato equivalent you are drinking each night.  This will help you to get the most out of your beer without getting too much!