Vodka vs Beer – Which is Healthier?

Our Verdict

When comparing vodka to beer, we picked the vodka.

Why?

As you might have guessed, neither are exactly healthy. But one of them is relatively, and we stress relatively, less bad than the other.

In the category of nutrients, vodka is devoid of nutrients, and beer has small amounts of some vitamins and minerals—but the amounts are so small, that you would need to drink yourself to death before benefiting from them meaningfully. And while beer gets touted as “liquid bread”, it really isn’t. A thousand years ago it will have been a lot less alcoholic and more carby, but even then, it wasn’t a health product aside from that it provided a way of making potentially contaminated water safer to drink.

In the category of carbohydrates, vodka nominally has none, due to the distillation process, and beer has some. Glycemic index websites often advise that the GI of beers, wines, and spirits can’t be measured as their carb content is not sufficient to get a meaningful sample, but diabetes research tells a more useful story:

Any alcoholic drink will generally cause a brief drop in blood sugars, followed by a spike. This happens because the liver prioritises metabolizing alcohol over producing glycogen, so it hits pause on the sugar metabolism and then has a backlog to catch up on. In the case of alcoholic drinks that have alcohol and carbs, this will be more pronounced—so this means that the functional glycemic load of beer is higher.

That’s a point in favor of vodka.

Additionally, in terms of the alcohol content, correctly-distilled vodka’s alcohol is pure ethanol, while beer will contain an amount of methanol that will vary per beer, but an illustrative nominal figure could be about 16mg/L. Methanol is more harmful than ethanol.

So that’s another point in favor of vodka.

Once again, neither drink is healthy; both are distinctly unhealthy. But unit for unit, beer is the least healthy of the two, making vodka the lesser of two evils.

Want to learn more?

You might like to read:

• Can We Drink To Good Health? (answer: we cannot, but this was about alcohol’s proposed heart-healthy benefits)
• Guinness Is Good For You* (it isn’t, but this was the long-time slogan and marketing campaign that fooled many)
• How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol
• How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

Take care!