eli5 if something has 7% of alcohol and you drink 2 bottles of it,you don’t consume 14% of alcohol. but if a cookie has 100 calories and you eat two,you consume 200 calories. why?
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If you buy two shirts for $5 each, you spend $10. If you buy two shirts at 50% off, you’re not getting them for free.
Calories are counted as a value.
Alcohol is measured as a fraction of volume, not a volume consumed.
If there are 100mL of a drink which is 7% alcohol, that means there are 7mL of alcohol in it. If you drink two such drinks, you have drank a total of 200mL of liquid, and 14mL of it was alcohol. But what is 14/200? It’s 0.07 or 7%.
Percent is a ratio. It means we don’t need to know the exact value of both items (the alcohol and the total volume). If we know one, we can find the other by using the ratio. But let’s try something that does change like you’re asking. Let’s say you have a few drinks (maybe 3) and your B.A.C jumps from 0 to 0.03% if you drink another 3 drinks, your B.A.C. should jump to about 0.06% this is because you’re adding alcohol to your blood, but you’re not adding (much) more blood. And that’s the denominator of the percent ratio.
For the alcoholic drink, to avoid confusion, let’s just say you’re pouring it into a punch bowl. By pouring one in, you’re adding both water and alcohol so the punch bowl has 7% alcohol in it. If you pour a second drink into the punch bowl you are adding more alcohol (which you would think would make it higher concentration), but you’re also adding more water (which you would think would dilute it) so it cancels out and has the same concentration as before.
Because you are comparing different things. Calories are the amount of “energy” in a food. Alcohol percentage is a measure of how “strong” the drink is.
Alcohol has 7 cal per gram (“energy”) plus all the other sugar, juice and other calories in the drink (more calories in mixed drinks/beers). If you look at the calories of a serving of beer, you could be consuming 150 calories per drink.
Alcohol percentage is a ratio describing how much alcohol is in the drink. That doesn’t change no matter how much of it you drink.
Calorie content is an absolute value which does increase if you eat more.
A beer is a beer and a cookie is a cookie. If you look at the whole beer, 7% of that beer is alcohol. Much like you could look at a cookie and say it has 7% sugar, not 7% calories.
You have. You’ve drunk 14% of *one bottle* of alcohol. You just chose to spread the journey out over two bottles.
If I have a 1L bottle, and I fill up half with coke, and the other half, it’s 50% coke and 50% pepsi.
If I drink it, that’s 0.5L coke, and 0.5L pepsi. That’s 50% of coke.
If I make another one, again, 0.5L and 0.5L and drink that one, I’ve drunk a total of 1L coke and 1L pepsi.
I drank a bottle of 50% coke, twice. That still isn’t 100% coke.
Calories are an absolute, percentages stay consistent. You’ve consumed twice as many calories from alcohol if you drink two bottles, but the ratio of alcohol to water and other things is the same and doubles as well.
If a bottle contains 330ml and is 7% alcohol, that’s about 23ml of alcohol. You drink two of them – that’s about 46ml of alcohol.
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