Cocktails and calories: Beer, wine and liquor calories can really add up. Here are the breakdowns for your favorite bar beverages - Nutrition

Cocktails and calories: Beer, wine and liquor calories can really add up. Here are the breakdowns for your favorite bar beverages - Nutrition

Shape, Jan, 2002 by Amy Goldhammer, Cristina Markarian

What wets your whistle? A cold beer? A slushy margarita? A glass of red wine? At a party, a happy hour or a night by the fireplace, a drink is such a natural accompaniment that sometimes we forget about the calories we're consuming. Big mistake: Calories from alcohol add up quickly. Our bodies don't register liquids in terms of fullness," says Elizabeth Somer, R.D., a nutritionist and author of The Origin Diet (Henry Holt, 2001). "The reason you gain weight from alcohol is that you don't compensate by eating less later. You still eat the same amount, regardless of whether you had the drink."

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Remember this too: Even though the screwdriver you order at brunch has vodka and orange juice, mixed drinks provide little to no nutritional value - only calories. "Alcohol is not an essential nutrient," says Somer. "It has a diuretic effect on the body. Even if you mix it with orange or cranberry juice, you are more likely to flush the nutrients out of your system."

To help you learn what's really in your drink, check out the following guide to the ingredients and the calorie and carb counts in some of the most common alcoholic beverages. Then turn the page to find out what you, Shape readers, are drinking, based on a recent Web survey we conducted. Cheers.

Beer

Ingredients Processed, fermented and brewed grains, most commonly barley; hops (which are from the hop plant, related to hemp) to give the brew its distinctive bitterness; and malt. Beer can range from light ales to dark stouts depending on the proportions of malt and barley. As a rule of thumb, the darker the color of the brew, the higher the calorie count.