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
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 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 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 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 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
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 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, 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 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 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 more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.