Alcohol Concern has set up a new website for ‘Dry January’, which features some shocking claims about the cost of alcohol to our society. Not a single one of these claims has a credited source.
I have repeatedly asked Alcohol Concern where it gets figures such as “40% of hospital admissions by day and 60% at night are caused by alcohol” from. It has ignored these requests. I’m taking the silence as tacit admission that its claims are at best deliberate distortions of the truth, at worst simply made up.
I expect nothing else from an organisation that is becoming increasingly hysterical about the dangers of drink. However, I did expect better of Drinkaware.
This body, partially funded by the drinks industry, promises to give consumers “the facts” about alcohol. So I was surprised when an ad it had created popped up on my Facebook page claiming that a pint of lager has the same calories as a burger.
The ad did not specify what kind of lager or what kind of burger. A Big Mac has 490 calories. I know that beer — any beer — contains nowhere near that. I also know that there is no fat in beer compared to 29 grammes of fat in a Big Mac. So why were we making this comparison?
Once again, I asked Drinkaware on Twitter why it was making false claims. To its credit, it actually responded to my question.
It explained that it makes calorie comparisons in order to make people think differently about alcohol. There is nothing wrong with that, so long as you are making accurate comparisons.
But it then explained that it was comparing a pint of 5% ABV lager, which has 230 calories, with a basic McDonald’s hamburger, which is 250 calories.
Now, the more mathematically minded readers among you have probably already spotted the first problem with this statement: 230 is not the same as 250.
The difference between the two figures is quite significant — one is almost 10% higher than the other.
By its own admission, Drinkaware is therefore wrong when it tells people the calorific value is the same. Its ad didn’t say “almost as much as” or “similar to”, it says “the same as”.
But there’s another problem too. The ads do not specify that we’re talking about 5% ABV lager. By just saying “a pint of lager” Drinkaware is implying that the comparison is between averages — a typical pint and a typical burger.
I could argue that hardly anyone eats the basic McDonald’s hamburger and the ad might mislead people into thinking the comparison is being made with a much more calorific Big Mac or Whopper, which spring to mind more readily if you say the word ‘burger’.
But, more importantly, it is grossly misleading to take a 5% ABV lager as a point of comparison. The three leading lager brands in the UK are Carling (4% ABV), Foster’s (4% ABV) and Stellas Artois (4.8% ABV, even though the Drinkaware website’s ‘facts’ are out of date and claim it is still 5% ABV).
It’s getting increasingly difficult to even buy a 5% ABV lager in a pub, as leading brands slash their strength to benefit from paying less duty. It is simply wrong to use 5% ABV lager to make a comparison as if it were typically representative of what people are drinking.
According to the British Beer & Pub Association, the average strength of beer in the UK is 4.2% ABV. Depending on the style, this gives you a pint containing between 180 and 210 calories — not 250, not even 230.
Drinkaware defended this by saying that it uses a range of different strengths to make comparisons. Maybe this is true from time to time, but on its website 5% ABV lager is the only one listed, and the ads don’t even specify that this is the basis of the claim.
So what have we learned?
Depressingly, even bodies funded by the drinks industry itself are using your money to unfairly and falsely denigrate beer.
But I guess the most useful lesson here is that if you lend £230 to someone from Drinkaware, you can ask for £250 back because it is the same number.