Alcohol doesn't make you fat says new book

Science writer Tony Edwards will be loved by women up and down the country. Extracts from his new book 'The Good News About Booze' suggests that drinking doesn't pile on the calories. As many of us find out, as soon as you go on a diet you are told to lay off the wine as it contains as many calories as a slice of cake. Alcohol certainly is said to contain lots of calories, but the curious fact remains that alcohol isn't fattening, he claims.

Edwards sites several studies that looked at the effects of alcohol consumption on weight. In the nineties, researchers at Harvard embarked on a survey of almost 20,000 middle-aged women, whose drinking habits and weight were tracked for almost 13 years. At the start, the women were all roughly UK dress sizes 8 to 12. By the end, about 9,000 had put on significant amounts of weight, and some had become clinically obese. All other things being equal, you’d expect those that had put on weight to be the drinkers. But they weren't. In fact, those who had gained weight were the women who didn't drink, and the skinnies were the heaviest drinkers.

A 2004 study on young laboratory rats found the more alcohol the rats were given to drink, the more weight they lost — even though their total calorie intake remained stable. A more recent study on mice in 2008 at the University of Austin, Texas, found much the same thing. Two groups of mice were given either plain water or water containing 20 per cent alcohol. To the researchers' surprise, although both groups of mice at the same amount of food, the alcohol-drinking mice put on no extra weight. In other words, the alcohol calories were not assimilated.