By Callum Winterford and Jack Watts
With Euro 2012 due to kick off this weekend, it’s time, once again, for the livers of London’s male population to take a serious battering.
Lager will be our friend while we dream and speculate of tournament victory, before inevitably drowning our footballing woes and kissing goodbye to England.
But lager is our friend at a price.
Using information provided by www.weightlossresources.co.uk, we discovered that the lowest amount of calories one could expect to consume in a normal pint of lager was in a pint of Carling, which still contains an enormous 180 calories.
On the other side of the spectrum, Grolsch and Heineken contain a mammoth 250 calories per pint.
We conducted a poll of men in their twenties at Islington pubs, and 76 per cent said that they wouldn’t change their choice of lager and swap to a different lager if it had less calories.
It seems as if we couldn’t really care less about what it does to our bodies as long as we end up strewn across a pub couch confessing our undying love to a 60 year-old barmaid with a penchant for leather jackets and tattoos of skulls.
Nick Vallottton, a nurse at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital and expert on the health effects of alcohol, said: “Lager contains an enormous amount of calories, which will then be converted into energy, and then, if it is not used, into fat.”
He said that 10 pints a week should be an absolute maximum if you want to maintain any sort of healthy lifestyle, and that having three completely alcohol-free days could be highly beneficial.
He also said that people’s lifestyle choices are often very different on a night out and rather than eating healthily, people would be more likely to indulge in the fine cuisine of the local kebab shop, laying on hundreds of more unnecessary calories.
He said: “Young lads are much more likely to get into fights under the influence of alcohol, especially if they are placed in unfamiliar surroundings. They could get criminal records, preventing them from getting jobs.”
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