“Three Budweisers equal a Quarter Pounder”

“Three Budweisers equal a Quarter Pounder” is the headline of a newspaper story reporting the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) proposal for nutritional labels on alcoholic beverages. ¹

The CSPI proposal is a good one but doesn’t go far enough. It only calls for listing the caloric content of an alcoholic drink. But Americans also care about such important things as total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and salt.

By only calling for caloric information, the CSPI proposal leads to such erroneous and dangerous conclusions as “drinking a beer is one-third as bad for health as eating a greasy burger.” But a hamburger is loaded with fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and salt. The alcoholic drinks aren’t. ²

Food	Calories	Total Fat	Saturated Fat	Cholesterol	Sodium
Quarter Pounder	430	21 g	8 g	70 mg	770 mg
Regular Beer	146	0	0	0	18 mg
Shot of Liquor (whiskey, rum, vodka, etc.)	97	0	0	0	Trace
Glass of Red Wine	89	0	0	0	5 mg

A nutritional label that only lists calories is a deceptive and misleading label.