Why I’m certain the calories in wine don’t make you fat

TONIGHT I will uncork a bottle of robust red wine and drink about half of it. It’s a ritual I’ve been performing for the past 20 years — and one I credit as the key to my ongoing good health.

But according to the medical establishment, this makes me an anomaly as my BMI is a healthy 25. Why is that so odd? Because alcohol, we are told, makes you fat — which is why a number of establishment bodies are campaigning for alcohol to be labelled with its calorie content, which is quite high. In theory, my half- bottle is the same as three slices of cake.

So how come, after a couple of decades glugging half a bottle of wine a day, I’m not a 20-stone porkie?

Let me tell you why I and millions of drinkers like me are not. A year or so ago, I spent months in the Royal Society of Medicine’s library in London, sifting through thousands of medical studies about alcohol. One of the first I read made me sit bolt upright. It suggested that in highly controlled laboratory tests, if alcohol calories are substituted for food calories, subjects lose weight.

In theory, calories are interchangeable: there’s no difference between an alcohol calorie and a food calorie. But here were topnotch scientists demonstrating this was nonsense.

To understand why, we need to go back to the origins of the calorie system. Back to the 1880s when an American agricultural chemist called Wilbur Atwater decided to see how much ‘energy’ different foods contained. To measure this, he treated different foods like coal: burn them to ash in a furnace and measure how much heat it produced. He called the units of heat ‘calories’. He measured nine calories per gram coming off highfat foods and about four calories per gram from carbohydrates and proteins. Alcohol, of course, is highly combustible. So when Atwater tested it, it burned like a firecracker. Hence the high calorie value ascribed to it today.

Now a small but growing number of nutritionists think the calorie theory is flawed. Atwater’s mistake, they say, was to assume that we use the energy in food as if our bodies were a furnace — and that if we don’t use up all the energy, it will be deposited as fat.

But take nuts. They are among the top-ten most calorific foods, yet studies show they don’t cause us to put on weight.

Which brings me to the Glycemic Index — the measure of how much glucose different foods produce in the bloodstream. Called the GI Theory, it’s beginning to supplant the Calorie Theory as the explanation for weight gain.

Foods that have a high GI score — such as bread and cakes — produce a l arge amount of glucose which, if not used to power muscles, is stored as fat. However, high-calorie foods such as nuts produce little glucose, so have a low GI score, explaining why they don’t put on weight.

Alcohol produces zero glucose, explaining its lack of effect on weight. And though wine has other ingredients (fermented grape juice), these score very low on the Glycemic Index, explaining why it isn’t fattening.

Other good news for wine lovers is that in laboratory tests, winedrinking rats have been found to gain less weight than water-drinking rats on identical food intakes because wine has the miraculous

property of reducing the size of fat cells. Constituents of wine such as ellagic acid and piceatannol may be responsible, but that’s still only a theory.

But what about beer? Finnish researchers have found that beer scores exceptionally high on the Glycemic Index — probably because of its non-alcohol ingredients (mainly malt). That’s why heavy beer drinkers tend to develop a tell-tale tummy — not because of the alcohol.

There is one major link between alcohol and weight, but that’s to do with food. Alcohol is a powerful appetite stimulant, so the more you drink, the more you are tempted to eat.

The clinical evidence from studies on animals and human beings is crystal clear that alcohol calories have no effect on weight. So, putting calorie values on alcohol labels will do nothing to stem Europe’s growing obesity epidemic. My findings prompted me to write a book called The Good News About Booze.

In fact, it may even cause harm: the rise in ‘drunk-orexics’ has even been documented — predominantly young women who don’t eat on days when they intend to drink heavily, in the mistaken belief that alcohol will add to their weight.

Labelling would reinforce their misguided behaviour.

It’s obvious to me what this is really about. It’s about trying to get us all to drink less. This is, of course, wholly laudable. I’m all for heavy drinkers being persuaded to cut down, but not by lying to people.

Meanwhile, the obesity crisis, fuelled by slothful lifestyles and increasing consumption of sugar and carbohydrate-laden low-fat foods, rages on. But the socalled experts say the so-called calories in alcohol are also to blame. Nonsense!