How Many Calories in Your Daily Alcohol?

Booze as food.

Everywhere we turn, the news is packed with stories about the nation’s obesity epidemic. But one little-discussed fact about our daily calorie count is that Americans consume an average of 100 calories each day from alcohol, according to new numbers from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

The center, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that on a daily basis, about 33 % of men and 18% of women consume alcohol calories daily. Men, who drink more than women, account for 150 daily calories, on average. Women consume a little over 50 calories in the form of alcohol, or roughly half a glass of wine. Predictably, the hardest-drinking cohort was men aged 20-39, who accounted for about 175 calories on daily average.

That may not sound like much—and it is generally within the normal moderation guidelines of one drink per day for women and two drinks for men. However, among members of the study group, about one in five men, and 6% of the women, consumed more than 300 alcohol calories daily—three drinks or more. Considering that the average daily per capita calorie consumption was about 2,500 calories in 2008, according to USDA estimates, this category of drinker can easily end up downing 15% or more of the daily caloric intake in the form of alcohol. The report notes that government dietary guidelines for “solid fats and added sugars”—the  broad category into which alcohol falls—should represent “no more than 5%-15% of calories,” no matter what the overall level of calorie intake.

“A lot of people don’t think about the calories in the alcoholic beverages,” Cynthia Ogden, one of the researchers, told USA Today. “It’s not a diet soda.” Even a shooter of hard liquor, hold the mixer, will run 50-90 calories.  A 12-oz Coke and a 12-oz beer both contain about 150 calories. “We’ve been focusing on sugar-sweetened beverages. This is something new,” said Ogden in an AP article, prompting the unnamed AP writer to ask: “Should New York officials now start cracking down on tall-boy beers and monster margaritas?”

But the Distilled Spirits Council, the lobbying group for hard liquor, saw the silver lining in the research: “The overwhelming majority of adults drink moderately.”

Nonetheless, nutrition policy director Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest told AP she was disappointed that the Obama administration plans to exempt alcoholic drinks from upcoming federal rules mandating calorie labeling on restaurant menus. Customers will be able to see the number of calories in a flavored ice tea drink, but not the calorie count for a Long Island Iced Tea, with easily four times as many calories.

The NCHS Data Brief also found that “no significant differences were observed in average calories per day from alcoholic beverages consumed by non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, and Hispanic persons.” In addition, those in the highest income category drank more than those whose income was at or below the poverty line. Men preferred beer, and women preferred wine.

The study was based on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey for 2007-2010. Researchers collected data through in-home interviews and at a mobile examination center. The researchers oversampled population subgroups to obtain reliable estimates of nutritional measures in those cohorts.

Graphics Credit: http://www.mslimalicious.com/

NIH Director Calls Off NIDA-NIAAA Merger

Nation’s addiction research institutes to remain separate but unequal.

Two years ago, the National Institutes of Health’s Scientific Management Review Board (SMRB) issued a report recommending that NIH move to establish a new institute focused on substance use, abuse, and addiction-related research to optimize NIH research in these areas. The idea was to combine the two existing addiction research agencies: the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). Skeptics like myself wondered if it would ever happen.And now we have our answer—no, it’s not going to happen. (NIH'S Collins)-->

Score one for the alcohol researchers, who mostly opposed the merger from the start, viewing it as more of a hostile takeover. NIAAA has always been the weaker sister in the addiction research family. With only half of NIDA’s billion-dollar budget, NIAAA deals strictly with alcohol research, even if the NIAAA has at times seemed unsure of what constitutes its main area of study—alcohol the addictive drug, or alcohol the healthy beverage. The merger would have represented a recognition that alcohol is just another drug, albeit a legal one.

It was an obvious thing to do. Former NIH director Harold Varmus had complained that the sprawl was hobbling NIH’s ability to “respond to new science.”

However, in a Science (sub req) interview that year,  Francis Collins, the current director of the NIH, said: “I guess most people would have said, ‘Well yeah, of course.’ But when you look at the details…. and you consider that alcohol is after all a legal substance and 90% of us at some point in our lives are comfortable with taking it in while the drug abuse institute is largely focused on drugs that are not legal. So there's a personality of the institute issue here that people thought might be important to preserve, others thought would be good not to preserve.”

It did not take long for the fraternity of alcohol researchers to view the potential move with alarm. Acting NIAAA director Dr. Kenneth Warren offered up what has come to be seen as the basic counter-argument: “The best way forward is a structure that increases collaboration all across NIH… nothing is gained by structural merger.” Warren said he favored “a separate, but equal” pair of agencies. “Alcoholism is a much broader issue than simply addiction.” 

Here is where it starts to get tricky. The assertion that alcoholism is not simply an addiction distills the disagreement down to its essence, which can be found not so much within the arena of science as within the arenas of morality, ethics, and the law.

On Friday, the traditional time for troubling news announcements in the media world, the NIH released its statement  from Director Collins: “After rigorous review and extensive consultation with stakeholders, I have concluded that it is more appropriate for NIH to pursue functional integration, rather than major structural reorganization, to advance substance use, abuse, and addiction-related research.”

Collins added: “The time, energy, and resources required for a major structural reorganization are not warranted, especially given that functional integration promises to achieve equivalent scientific and public health objectives.”

 But the smooth and cost-effective advance of addiction science may have met a stumbling block in the director’s refusal to do the obvious, and streamline the crucial research on drugs and addiction performed by the nation’s premier medical research agency, the NIH. As one observer commented,  there are rumors that “the alcohol beverage industry is lobbying Kentucky politicians, including U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, to keep the institutes separate because it doesn’t want alcohol to be associated with cocaine.”

Short Subjects

Brief news on drugs and addiction.

The editorial staff at Addiction Inbox (see photo), occasionally finds itself overwhelmed with news and opinion worth broadcasting. Hence, this bullet list of drug/alcohol related news from recent weeks:

•    Children with heavy alcohol exposure show decreased brain plasticity, according to recent research on fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FAS) using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. The research, supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), included 70 children heavily exposed to alcohol in utero. According to NIAAA, the children showed “lost cortical volume,” described in the study as a pattern of static growth “most evident in the rear portions of the brain—particularly the parietal cortex, which is thought to be involved in selective attention and producing planned movement.”

•    Combining medications for a better outcome is a staple of medical practice. So it’s not surprising to see the same thing being investigated in addiction treatment. Scientists evaluating medications for alcoholism have found that in some cases, mixing the medicine gives better outcomes. In two separate trials, naltrexone proved to be a more effective treatment for alcoholism when combined with either acamprosate (reported in Addiction), or baclofen (as detailed by Dr Mark Gold at the recent meeting of the Society for Neuroscience). In the Addiction study, the authors concluded that “acamprosate has been found to be slightly more efficacious in promoting abstinence and naltrexone slightly more efficacious in reducing heavy drinking and craving,” which suggests the possibility of using different drugs at different stages of recovery for maximum benefit. In preliminary work on baclofen, some researchers now claim that combining it with naltrexone often leads to better outcomes.

•    Every year at about this time, the rumors start flying: Did you hear that Amsterdam is closing its marijuana coffee shops? This breathless annual announcement is never true, and this year, despite all the fuss over “weed passes” and border skirmishes over drug traffic in the south of the Netherlands, Amsterdam’s mayor recently announced that he has no attention of closing the roughly 200 cannabis shops in his city by year’s end, as originally mandated by the now-defunct conservative government. In addition, rumors are flying that the incoming cabinet of Prime Minister Mark Rutte is already backing away from the previous government’s position on banning foreigners from the shops, according to a New York Times report. “Changes to the new policy have not been finalized,” according to a spokesperson for the Dutch Justice Ministry, quoted in the Times. Rutte himself has hinted that the ban may remain intact, but that local councils may be allowed to override that decision—an outcome not untypical of Dutch politics. “I’m guessing that behind the curtains, it’s already been arranged,” said Michael Veling of the Dutch Cannabis Retailers Association.

•    Here’s a finding you can easily test for yourself. Conduct a conversation with a heavily intoxicated chronic drinker. Introduce ironic, “wink-wink” comments into the exchange. Really lay on the irony. And then sit back and watch most of it sail right by your drunk and maddeningly literal companion. And now science is attempting to confirm it: A modest recent study in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research says that “drinking too much alcohol can interfere with men’s feelings of empathy and understanding of irony.” 22 men in an alcoholic treatment program read a series of stories ending with either an ironic comment or a straightforward one. Chronic heavy drinkers identified ironic sentences 63 % of the time, compared to a group of non-alcoholics, who identified 90 % of the ironic comments. Lead researcher Simona Amenta said in a press release that the results may mean that alcoholics “tend to underestimate negative emotions; it also suggests that the same situation might be read in a totally different way by an alcoholic individual and another person.” Ya think?

Photo Credit: http://www.globaljournalist.org/