If you’ve browsed the refrigerated section of a liquor store recently, a bevy of pre-mixed cocktails may have caught your eye – piña coladas, vodka mules, rum and cokes, even a mojito. And if you’ve cracked one open, you may have thought, “A little sweet for my taste, but not bad.” Turn the bottle around to look for the nutrition facts label to figure out exactly how much sugar or artificial sweetener is in there … and you’re likely to come up empty.
Many ready-to-drink cocktails and alcopops contain as much sugar as carbonated beverages like Coca-Cola. All that sugar – and other additives – has many alcoholic beverages falling into the category of “ultra-processed foods” (UPF). But unlike other sugary beverages, most alcoholic drinks aren’t required to print nutrition facts – opening up a loophole for ultra-processed foods to unknowingly sneak their way into our diets.
So how are you supposed to know what’s in your after-dinner drink or cocktail out on the town? It’s complicated.
What makes alcohol ultra-processed?
The idea of ultra-processed foods was first introduced by Carlos Monteiro, a professor of nutrition and public health at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. In 2009, Monteiro argued that nutritionists shouldn’t only be paying attention to the nutrients in food – like sugar, fat and sodium – but also the amount of processing used to formulate them.
While some foods, like raw vegetables and dried fruits, are “unprocessed” or “minimally processed”, the majority of foods are “processed” in some way (think canned peaches, fresh baked bread, cheese or pickled vegetables). Not all processing is necessarily unhealthy – in fact, it’s allowed us to combat hunger by preserving foods year-round and vitamin deficiencies by nutritionally fortifying our foods.
Since the 1980s, however, a growing percentage of the global food supply has become “ultra-processed”, that is industrially formulated by combining additives (like artificial colors and preservatives) and substances extracted from foods (like hydrogenated fats and starches). Today’s ultra-processed foods include everything from packaged bread to sugary breakfast cereals and frozen dinners – and are linked to a host of health issues including diabetes, obesity, depression and certain cancers.
It’s difficult to say whether alcoholic drinks count as UPFs, Monteiro and colleagues wrote in 2019. But they provide some general guidance: fermented drinks like beer, cider and wine are considered “processed” and “ultra-processed” if they are fermented and then the resulting alcohol is distilled – like whiskey, gin, rum and vodka.
While wine, for example, is made from fermenting grapes, a liquor like brandy is made from first fermenting grapes into wine, then heating that wine until it turns into a vapor and condensing the vapor back into a liquid with a much higher alcohol content, says Gavin Lavi Sacks, a professor of food science at Cornell University and author of Understanding Wine Chemistry.
The concept of ultra-processed foods is still new and researchers disagree about exactly which foods should be categorized under it – there’s a notable difference between Cheetos, that are engineered to be maximally addictive, and distilled liquors, which have been made for hundreds of years.
Another way to determine if an alcoholic beverage is UPF is by looking at its ingredients. Like many foods, alcohol can have additional ingredients inserted during processing. Some of them can be used to standardize the product they can offer year to year (because grapes, barley, hops and other base ingredients are crops that can vary in quality from year to year). Other additives include caramel coloring to make batches of tequila from different years look the same before blending or tartaric acid to make wine that’s lost its acidity a bit more sour.
Why it’s hard to figure out which drinks are UPF
But it can be hard to tell exactly which additives might be in an alcoholic beverage because most are not required to print ingredient labels or nutrition facts. In the US, alcohol is regulated by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which is part of the treasury department (there are a few exceptions, like hard seltzers and wine with less than 7% alcohol by volume) – not the Food and Drug Administration.
The reasoning goes back to the prohibition era. It was to make sure “the distribution channels weren’t controlled by unsavory actors”, said Sacks. Plus, “alcohol was not part of a nutritious diet, as opposed to what the FDA was regulating, which was part of a typical person’s diet.”
Still, there are a few ways for consumers to figure out which additives might be in a beverage.
Although the tax and trade bureau, or TTB, does not require nutritional labels, it does enforce fairly strict standards of identity. For wine, Sacks says, that means any additives “need to be something that naturally occurs in grapes or wine”. If a producer wants to add anything outside of the TTB’s approved list of additives (and processing aids, which do not remain in the final product), they would need to relabel the product as “wine with added flavors” and then include an ingredient list. Some producers have taken to using the term “natural wine” to refer to wine that is made with few interventions, but the term isn’t well-regulated in the US, which means that they can, on occasion, still sneak in sulfites and other additives.
“We know that dozens of additives are allowed in wine and even more are allowed in beers and cocktails. As consumers, we deserve to know which products have which additives so we can make informed choices about what to put in our bodies,” said Eva Greenthal, senior policy scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food policy advocacy group.
The additives allowed in distilled beverages vary, but the most common ones are glycerin (a sugar alcohol) and caramel colorings. (The TTB explains on its website that any substances that are “generally recognized as safe” and food and color additives that are “approved for its intended use” can be used in alcoholic beverages.)
Changes may be coming
But some advocates are calling for change.
The US last updated its warning labels on alcohol in 1989 to discourage consuming alcohol during pregnancy or before driving. Now, it’s considering adding additional labels. In February, the agency held listening sessions to receive public input on labels that would disclose alcohol content, nutritional information, allergens and ingredients.
However, Greenthal notes that the rule-making process at TTB has been delayed four times, so it’s unclear when, or if, these changes will happen.
Getting nutritional warning labels on alcohol would be a big step, says Marissa G Hall, a professor of health behavior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, who’s currently researching how the US government could best design alcohol warning labels. But ultimately she says UPF isn’t the biggest health concern surrounding alcoholic drinks – it’s the alcohol itself, which is linked to many types of cancer.
Getting a label on alcoholic beverages would be a huge step toward transparency, advocates say. But, it’s just a starting point to changing American consumers’ – and manufacturers’ – love of ultra-processed products.