DIETING AND BEER DRINKING
Options for continuing your favorite sport
BY JENNIFER DONOHUE

You are on a diet, but you love beer. What is a beer drinker to do? Do you want to lose that beer belly and look good for the ladies with their own beer goggles or just keep drinking those 500-calorie brown ales?

These are very tough decisions that can make your inner beer snob very insecure. One can give up seconds, desserts, carbs, sodas, mochas with whole milk, but beer?! How will you survive?

Well, beer makers have come to the rescue — in a watered-down, kind of diluted way. Diet beers are a hot item right now, with mostly low carbohydrate options available.

Considering that beer is very close to the make up of bread, carbohydrate reduction is one of the ways to reduce the caloric affects of beer on a diet. This is done by adjusting the grain mixes by adding corn and rice. Changing yeast types and mashing temps also helps. The fermentation times are also made longer to convert as many of the carbs to alcohol as possible.

Obvious to a beer drinker is the other way to cut calories in beer: reducing the alcohol level. A low carb and low alcohol beer has about 7 percent alcohol. According to the federal government, this can be called a "low-carb" beer on the label.

Since alcohol spurs the liver into making undesirable fats called triglycerides, low-alcohol beer can help the dietary effects of beer on the girth. It is just not as flavorful, but it is an option.

There are the macro brew products like Miller Ultra and Light, Latrobe Rock Green Light, and the microbrew type of light beers like Coastal Light Pale Ale with only 5.4 carbs. This can be found at Trader Joe's. My high-carb, high-alcohol research may be full of holes: Does anyone out there know of any local low carb beers?

Unfortuately, moderation is the key to all diets — or not drinking at all. But that is so boring.

Product of EW's Advertising Department

 

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