Why Doesn't Alcohol Have Nutrition Labels?

Alcohol contains calories and ingredients like any other beverage, but only rarely does its packaging list those ingredients and nutrition facts. Learn why in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel bomb here. If you feel like
you can't even consider consuming a candy bar without being
confronted with its chloric content, you're right. The same thing
goes for just about every piece of packaged food you
see in stores, plus every bottled, canned, or carton beverage.
A nutrition facts label depicts detailed info on the amounts

(00:24):
of fat, sugar, sodium, and more found inside. But while
your favorite breakfast cereals, sodas, and sandwich fixings are subject
this type of in your face transparency, you may have
noticed that booze is typically off the hook, residing behind
factless labels. So what gives? The answer lies in the
powers that be. While the Food and Drug Administration or

(00:46):
FDA regulates the safety of you guessed it food, including
non alcoholic beverages, it doesn't govern the alcohol industry. That
honor belongs to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade
Bureau or t t B, an agency that doesn't require labeling.
While beer, wine and spirits companies aren't legally mandated to
print the nutritional info on their products, consumer advocates have

(01:08):
been calling for the t t B to change that,
and it has sort of in The agency made nutrition
labels optional for alcohol, but some health experts don't feel
the move was bold enough. Johns Hopkins public health researcher
Sarah Blake told vox in many adults take in a
tremendous amount of calories from alcohol, and I have no

(01:28):
idea she should know. Her work revealed that the average
American regularly consumes four hundred calories a day from alcohol alone.
A kind of I p A contains about two hundred
and fifty calories, a glass of red wine has about
a hundred and twenty five, and a shot of liquor
has about a hundred. The reasons behind the disparity in
label requirements between the f d A and t t

(01:49):
B goes back to Prohibition. When the ban on the
production and distribution of alcohol in America came to an end,
Congress passed the Alcohol Administration Act of five, which eventually
to the establishment of the t t B, but it's
rules around labeling have historically been a bit messy. Substances
that people might be sensitive to, like sulf fights, have

(02:09):
to be labeled, but other ingredients do not. Wines that
contain fourteen percent alcohol or more have to display alcohol content,
while wines from seven to four percent don't have to
list alcohol content if they're considered light or table. Oh
and wines with less than seven percent alcohol. Those aren't
regulated by the t t B at all. Those are
under the jurisdiction of the f d A, and so

(02:31):
they're required to display nutrition facts labels. Confusing, isn't it?
A Few brands Corona Light, Guinness, Heineken, and Coarse Light
do put calories and some nutrition information, though not the
ingredients on their bottles or packaging, but it's typically very
small print or hard to find. You might even have
to look on the bottom of the six pack to
find it. Who looks there. Bud Light, on the other hand,

(02:54):
began voluntarily including obvious labels listing its beers calories, fat, carbohydrates,
and protein per serving, as well as other ingredients in
February of twenty nineteen. Since then, Annheuser Busch has added
similar labeling to some of its other bud Light line beers,
including bud Light Lime, bud Light Orange, and bud Light
lemon TEA change is brewing, though, at least in the

(03:15):
beer industry, industry leaders including Anaheiuser Busch, Miller Coors, Heineken
US A Constellation brand beer division, North American Breweries, and
craft Brew Alliance, which together produce more than of the
volume of beer sold in the United States, have agreed
to voluntarily display nutrition facts by Today's episode were written

(03:38):
by Michelle Konstantinovski and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff
is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For
ruin this and lots of other well labeled topics, visit
our home planet, how stuff works dot com, and for
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