Beverage Costs vs. Calories: For Dieting Broke Partiers

As a beer drinker, I’m very aware of the high number of calories a beer contains. Lucky for me, I don’t drink enough of it to gain weight; however, I know they don’t call it a beer belly for nothing. It’s kinda gross really when you think about how fattening some kinds of alcoholic beverages are.

I only drink beer and wine, so I don’t have much experience with these other kinds of alcohol. I’m familiar with them from being a bartender while I attended University, but mixing drinks and drinking drinks are two very different things. I have a friend who carries little packets of Crystal Light to mix with vodka when she is out. She swears it’s the best drink for the fewest calories.

Brian Gawalt, a graduate student working on his Ph.D. at Berkeley University, recently completed a research paper which some people are calling “groundbreaking.” I don’t know if I would consider this groundbreaking information; however, it’s definitely useful and very interesting. He basically took two websites, Get Drunk Not Broke and Get Drunk Not Fat and studied the information carefully. He suggested that people want to get drunk but not broke or fat, so he merged the statistics from both sites to determine what alcoholic beverages are the least expensive and contain the fewest calories.

You can see his data graphed below, but either you have to be a graduate student to understand it, or I’m just dumb, cause it all looks confusing to me. It might be easier to just do what I did and read his research paper entitled Get Drunk But Neither Broke Nor Fat. Bottom line, Brian wrote, “I’m about to make a case that Everclear, Mad Dog 20/20 (Grape), and Olde English High Gravity 800 are the only three beverages that matter. And that you should save the Mad Dog just for special occasions.” Dang, I thought people only used Everclear to get a campfire started. Thanks Brian, you are obviously brilliant. With that being said, I think I’ll stick to my Michelob Ultra.