Wine Calories

How many calories are there in wine? With the whole world seeming to be on a diet these days, this is a question wine people hear a lot: Is it OK to drink wine on a calorie-restricted diet?

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Of course, here at LovetoKnow Wine our answer is an unequivocal “yes!” mostly because we love wine and we’d cut out extra food to get to indulge in out favorite glass. But the truth is you can drink a glass of wine on almost any diet and still meet your weight loss goal.

Before we get down to the numbers, let’s talk about why you’ll want to make room in your diet for all those wine calories.

Red wine in particular is thought to be good for your health. Drinking red wine seems to protect the heart; it’s what’s known as the French paradox — how do the French eat so much saturated fat in cheese and meats but have half the rate of cardiovascular deaths that America has? The answer seems to be something in the wine.

There are specific flavanoids in red wine grapes known as catechins, which seem to act as antioxidants and protect the body’s cells from damage. Wine may help to regulate cholesterol, prevent ulcers, keep people from developing colorectal cancer and prevent diabetes. Moderate drinking can also calm anxiety, aid digestion and stimulate the appetite.

So what is “moderate drinking”? Although there is no official line on how much wine gives you the optimum health benefits without the risks of overconsumption, most experts say one or two glasses of wine a day is ideal for women, while men can have two or three drinks a day. If you and your sweetie are regularly emptying a bottle a day, that’s probably a bit too much.

So, back to the issue at hand: how many calories are in that glass? Of course that varies depending on the manufacturer and the type of wine, but a good average is around 100 calories per four ounce glass. Red wine tends to have more calories than white, but white doesn’t offer the same health benefits as red.

Here are some more specific approximate calorie values for some of the most popular types of wine. Again, this is for a four-ounce glass, so if you’re drinking more than that, you’ll be getting more calories.

Slideshow:Types of Wine Glasses

If you’re only wanting one glass of wine, it’s pretty easy to fit most any wine into your diet. If you exercise a few extra minutes you’ll completely cancel out the calories.

If you like having a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, it’s possible to sabotage a diet by not counting wine in your daily calorie intake. That extra 200 calories a day adds 1,400 calories a week or 73,000 calories a year, which would cause you to gain 18 pounds if you didn’t compensate by eating less or exercising more.

But it’s pretty easy to make room for that extra 200 calories in your diet. Just cutting out one regular soda from your daily diet will give you most of the calories you need for your wine, and the health benefits of drinking wine instead of soda are huge.

You could also cut out a snack or change your snacking habits to something lower calorie to make up for the calories in your favorite adult beverage. If you ask us, a little sacrifice is more than worth the pleasure of drinking without worry.

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