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Nutrition Labels For Alcoholic Beverages?

Virtually all bottled beverages you can buy have handy-dandy nutrition labels from which you can access information about calories, carbs, and so forth. All beverages except the ones containing alcohol, that is. Why is that?

Maybe it’s because alcoholic beverages contain little to no protein, sodium, cholesterol, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, calcium and iron (remember that alcohol is metabolized as a fat, not a carbohydrate) — so why bother? Then again, alcohol does contain calories — a lot of them. Would people drink less if they knew how many calories they were consuming? Would they drink less if they knew how many “servings” of alcohol were contained in the bottle they just purchased?

Maybe it’s because of the cost of performing nutritional analyses on each vintage of wine, each and every year, would turn profitable vineyards into money losers? Then again, plenty of niche beverage producers who run reasonably narrow margin businesses have never complained about the requirement to provide nutritional information.

The Tax and Trade Bureau is the federal agency that decides what information must appear on the labels of alcoholic beverages. Currently, it does not require manufacturers of wine, beer and the hard stuff to list ingredients. It does require them to list chemicals that folks might have an adverse reaction to things like sulfites, aspartame, and dyes.

The Tax and Trade Bureau also mandates that wines containing 14 percent or more alcohol by volume must state this fact on a label. Wines containing less than 14 percent can either specify the alcohol content or affix the words “light wine” or “table wine” to their labels. In addition, “light” beer bottlers must state calorie and carbohydrate content, and distilled liquor bottlers must specify the alcohol content by volume. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*

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