The guide

200 calories of beer vs 200 calories of food

By GyroscopeUpdated November 15, 20269 sources

A calorie is a calorie on the label, but not in your body. Two hundred calories of regular beer, about a pint, are about two thirds alcohol. Your body can’t store alcohol, so it burns it first and pauses fat burning while it does. And the beer brings almost no protein or fiber, so it doesn’t fill you up the way 200 calories of food would.

Calorie counting treats every calorie the same, and for energy that’s roughly right. If you swap a 200-calorie snack for a 200-calorie beer, the number on the app doesn’t change. That’s why so many people budget drinks into a diet and are surprised when the scale doesn’t move. What the body does with those 200 calories is very different.

The same calories, three ways

USDA’s food tables list a 12 oz regular beer at 146 calories, with 1 g of protein, 13 g of carbohydrate and 0.7 g of fiber. Scale it up to 200 calories and you have about 16.4 oz, a bit more than a pint. At 5% alcohol that’s about 19 g of alcohol, and at 7 calories a gram, about 134 of the 200 calories come from the alcohol itself.

Now take 200 calories of cooked lentils, a little under a cup. USDA puts a full cup at 230 calories, 18 g of protein and 15.6 g of fiber, so 200 calories brings about 16 g of protein and 14 g of fiber. An apple with about three quarters of an ounce of almonds is another 200 calories, with about 4 g of protein and 6 g of fiber.

What your body does with the beer

It burns the alcohol first. Alcohol can’t be stored the way fat or carbs can, so the liver clears it before almost anything else, at a fixed pace. In 8 men who drank 24 g of alcohol, less than 5% of it became fat. The bigger effect was that fat burning across the whole body fell 73% while it cleared. One standard drink takes most adults about 2 to 3.5 hours to clear.

It doesn’t fill you up. In a 1995 study, people ate 240-calorie servings of 38 different foods and rated how full they felt for two hours. The same calories varied seven-fold, from boiled potatoes at the top to croissants at the bottom, and the foods with more protein, fiber and water were the most filling. Beer has almost no protein or fiber. A 2010 review found the calories in alcohol add to what people eat rather than replacing it.

It makes you hungrier. In a 2015 study, women who had alcohol before a meal had stronger brain responses to the smell of food and ate more. Then the broken sleep that follows a drinking night raises the hunger hormone ghrelin and lowers the fullness hormone leptin, as a 2004 study of short sleep found.

What your body does with the lentils

They bring the protein and fiber that made foods most filling in that 1995 study, and nothing in your body gets put on hold while you digest them. protein.guide has more on protein when you’re losing weight.

So are alcohol calories “empty”?

Close to it. They carry energy and almost nothing else, and they change how you handle the rest of the day’s food. The 200 calories are the same on paper. In your body, the beer costs more than its number.