Are you in the habit of checking labels when you go grocery shopping? If you’re watching your weight, you probably check out the fat, calorie, or carbohydrate content of foods and drinks before you buy them. If you’re diabetic, you have to keep a close eye on sugars. If you have allergies or moral objections to certain substances, you likely read the ingredient lists carefully before making a purchase. Some things have nutritional and ingredient lists that seem like a waste of time. For example, you’ve probably looked at the back of a bottle of water and seen Ingredients: water and Calories: 0 and thought “No kidding.” It might surprise you, then, that most types of alcohol aren’t required to have anything on their labels expect a standard warning about alcohol use.
Why don’t these labeling requirements apply to alcohol? The short answer is that it’s a holdover from Prohibition. In 1935, shortly after the repeal of Prohibition, Congress passed the Alcohol Administration Act, which established an agency that was in charge of generating tax revenue from the newly-legal sale of alcohol. This agency eventually became the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), which today still has the responsibility of regulating the labels on alcoholic beverages. Most other food and drink is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, which began requiring nutritional labeling on all packaged foods in 1990, but the TTB does not have such a requirement. Over the years, people have lobbied the TTB to require labels, but nothing ever came of it. In 2013, the TTB did finally make nutrition labels optional for alcohol, but it’s still not a requirement.
The rules that do exist regarding alcohol labels are somewhat convoluted. Bottles of distilled liquor must have a label indicating the alcohol percentage, as do bottles of wine with more than 14 percent alcohol. However, these labels are optional for wine with less than 14 percent alcohol, as well as for all beers. Wines with less than seven percent alcohol content and beers that don’t contain malted barley actually do fall under FDA rules, and therefore must list standard nutrition facts and ingredients, but labels about the alcohol content are optional. Apart from these exceptions, listing calorie counts is optional, and the only beverages that really bother are light beers that use their calorie count as a selling point. If you have food allergies, keep in mind that the listing of potential allergens like nuts is also optional.
Some medical experts argue that this lack of labeling is a serious public health issue. Many Americans consume two or more alcoholic beverages a day, which can account for a fifth of the daily recommended caloric intake. These people might be taking in far more calories than they’re aware of.
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