Weight

According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a standard serving (5- ounces) of table wine, red or white, contains 125 calories. By way of comparison, a 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola has 140 calories; a 12-ounce bottle of beer 150 calories; and an 8-ounce glass of whole milk 160 calories. This is an average for wine, since the calorie content will vary with the alcohol and residual sugar content of the wine. Sweet wines having higher calorie counts than dry wines. If you drink sweet white wines, your 5 ounce glass might contain 200 to 250 calories (a Hershey bar contains 210 calories).

If you are an Atkins, South Beach or other low carbohydrate diet subscriber, then you don’t really care about all those calories, do you? A lot of experts don’t seem to like these low carbohydrate diets, but I think they reflect a more natural way of eating than most diets, including our usual diets of eating everything we can get our hands on. When we were running around on the savannahs in Africa a million years ago, our diet consisted pretty much of meat and whatever plant material we could find. That’s what our bodies we adapted for. There was no bread or Twinkies or salads for that matter. We grew up on protein and fat. Now I need to carefully climb down from my soap box and get back to the column.

Unfortunately, wine is not much more carbohydrate friendly than it is calorie friendly. A 5-ounce serving of dry white table wine contains around 1.25 grams of carbohydrates, a glass of red around 2.5 grams. Yes, you guessed it, sweet wines will have substantially more carbohydrates than dry wines. So if that news isn’t bad enough, alcohol while not a carbohydrate, behaves metabolically a lot like a carbohydrate. So, for the purposes of a low carbohydrate diet, alcohol should be treated as a carbohydrate. There is some good news about wine and our waist line. Wine contains no fat and no cholesterol. I’ll drink to that.

As in so many things, moderation is the key. While there is no way around what you drink showing up on your waistline, total abstinence isn’t required. If you want to drink more wine, drink drier red wines rather than sweeter white wines. Also, there’s a tendency to eat more when you’re drinking. Watch how much and what you eat with your wine. But, most important, cut down on the quantity if you are really serious about your weight.