Cheers, but alcohol won’t make you fat

Alcohol calories are not the same as food calories. If they were my backside would be the size of Kent
Carol Midgley

I was in Cyprus last week where, I think it’s fair to say, my usual intake of alcohol was at the very least doubled. There was the ice-cold Keo lager by the pool at midday, the early evening mojito liveners, a goodly measure of local rosé wine with our meal and quite often a cheeky Baileys nightcap back at the hotel.

So can the Department of Health please explain to me why I’ve returned from holiday 4lb lighter? I don’t report this to be smug (well, yes, obviously I do) but chiefly because, according to DH officials, I should by now be carrying my blubber belly about in a reinforced wheelbarrow.

The first story I read when I got home was the latest in the DoH’s Let’s-Suck- All-The-Joy-Out-Of-Life-And-Make-Alcohol-More-Taboo-Than-Herpes campaign, which warns us that we’re destined for quadruple chins because drinking makes you fat. The average wine drinker consumes 2,000 alcohol calories a month, it says, which over a year is the “equivalent of 38 extra roast beef dinners”.

No it isn’t. I’m no scientist but, like most drinkers, I know that alcohol calories are not the same as food calories. They just aren’t. Otherwise, trust me, my backside would be the size of Kent. I could bang on about how you never see a fat alcoholic, which proves liquid calories are different, but I won’t because lots of 12-steppers would write tiresome letters to me.

So I’ll just challenge Phil Hope, the Health Minister, who uttered something depressing about how drinking more than a thimble of wine a day makes you a 30st hoofer, to join me in an experiment. We’ll both go into a room and, for however long it takes, I’ll drink a year’s worth of wine calories (24,000) and he can eat 38 roast dinners. Then we’ll see who puts on the most weight.

Will he take me up on this offer? No. Because by the end, though I would be gurning like a bloated carp and possibly in a coma, I wouldn’t be that much fatter, whereas he’d look like Bernard Manning. I’m hoping to patent this brilliant idea and sell it to the pro-drinking lobby.

The Government is increasingly obsessed with the alcohol intake of Middle England. While it should be focusing on 16-year-old binge drinkers, who vomit crate loads of WKD into town centre gutters each weekend, it chooses instead to frighten the bejesus out of Mr and Mrs Clutterbuck from Barnstaple, who enjoy sharing a bottle of Piat d’Or with their Findus pancakes each night.

Not long ago it was finger-wagging at the over-55s for having a bit of sangria on holiday and behaving “irresponsibly” — presumably, staying out after 11pm against the advice of their rep, Julie. There was the Know Your Limits campaign, conceived to ensure that no one could ever again have an after-work drink without thinking their liver would instantly gelatinise into scar tissue. And now this.

The obsession with this subject borders on the unhinged. One newspaper cautioned that one glass of white wine equalled four fish fingers. Is that meant to be a deterrent? Since when have fish fingers been a marker for degeneracy? Only the insane would deny that there’s a drinking problem in this country. Total alcohol consumption doubled in Britain between 1960 and 2002 (not difficult, actually, since many women’s yearly alcohol consumption in the early 1970s comprised three snowballs at Christmas) and in the 1980s and 1990s deaths from cirrhosis of the liver rose by more than two thirds for men and almost half for women. The increase has been especially sharp in people aged under 45. But let’s be realistic. Those deaths are unlikely to include Mr and Mrs Clutterbuck.

Instead of patronising en masse adults who, in the main, are perfectly capable of knowing when they’ve had enough, why doesn’t the Government be honest and concentrate on the groups that need shocking into abstinence? Why imply that everyone’s a secret alky? Or that drinking three pints will have the same effect fat-wise as scoffing a pile of pork pies?

I may be arrested for saying this but a few all-day benders can actually assist weight loss because two bottles of champagne doesn’t half kill the appetite. I’m not pretending it’s healthy — it’s a fast-track to trampville — but it is true. Ask anyone who’s followed the alcohol-only diet after being dumped: it knocks the Atkins into a cocked hat.

The beer belly is a myth. Not my words, but those of academics at University College London and the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine in Prague, whose research found “no link” between the amount of beer people drink and their stomach size. There are lardy beer drinkers but their size may be due to the kebabs and chips they hoover on the way home. They may be fatties anyway, regardless. I’ve known teetotallers who’ve been obese.

If the Government wants us sitting in every night drinking Ovaltine and pairing our socks, why not have the balls to tax alcohol so fiercely that only Simon Cowell can afford it? Isn’t that how it wants us — so cowed that we’ll be frightened to have a bowel movement without first consulting the Body Waste Elimination Tsar?

Actually I don’t believe it is. By inventing tin-pot campaigns that wind us up thus guaranteeing maximum publicity, the Government is conveniently seen to be “doing something”. Thus it avoids having to get stuck into the really expensive stuff such as setting up more state-funded rehab centres for those who really need it.

I know this may sound like the over-protesting of someone who likes a jar. But look, I don’t mind health ministers beating me over the head with truths about what alcohol really does — giving you nose veins like a map of Venice, making you leave your bag in a cab for the 347th time and impairing your judgment so badly that you wake up next to an acne-faced accountant called Derek with breath like Shrek.

Yes, all these things may happen to you if you drink too much. But don’t insult drinkers’ intelligence, eh? Or we may have to ask you to settle this outside.