Koreans get more calories from alcoholic beverages

By Kim Se-jeong

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said Sunday that the calories Koreans get through alcohol consumption have jumped two-and-a-half times in 16 years.

According to the center’s survey, Koreans’ consumption of alcoholic beverages grew both in quantity and calories from 1998 to 2014.

In 1998, people drank the equivalent of 48.9 grams of alcoholic beverages per day, but the figure grew by 2.6 times to 124.7 grams in 2014. In terms of calories, it also rose by 2.5 times from 39.3 kilocalories (kcal) to 100 kcal during the same period.

Almost 6,000 individuals took part in the annual survey.

Oh Kyung-won, one of the survey authors, said the consumption increase may have partly resulted from a growing variety of alcoholic beverages in the market. “Take beer for example. With Korean market more open to imported goods, people have more options than before, and that seems to encourage people to drink more,” Oh said.

She also said more and more people are enjoying lower-strength alcohol, such as wine and makgeolli rather than soju or whiskey, and this may have also made people drink more.

Boilermakers may be one reason as well, as a survey by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety showed that this cocktail played an important role in high consumption. According to the survey, 95 percent of 2,000 respondents said they drank alcoholic beverages, and among them, 55.8 percent answered they had boilermakers.

The KCDC report also showed that people in 2014 took in 2,074.5 kcal a day, a slight increase from 1998’s 1,933.5 kcal. Of the calories, people obtained 988.5 kcal from grains, followed by 230.7 kcal from meat, 100 kcal from alcoholic beverages, 90.4 kcal from milk, 89.2 kcal from fruit and 86.4 kcal from vegetables.