How to track alcohol

Do you enjoy having an alcoholic beverage now and then? With Carbon, this is no problem! Here are the steps you need to take to track alcohol in the app.

Find out whether you are using the Label Calories or Macro Calories setting
Track the beverage as carbs or fat
Input into the app

Label calories vs. macro calories setting

Have you ever gone to track an alcoholic beverage and been confused why there were so many calories but very few macros or no calories or macros at all? There's a reason for this. ⁠

Seeing calories and low macros means you are using Carbon's 'label calories' feature.
If you don't see any calories or macros, you're using Carbon's 'macro calories' feature. ⁠ ⁠

No matter what feature you're using in Carbon, there will always be a catch to how you track alcohol.

Macro calories will have either no calories or low calories since the macronutrients are wrong.
Labeled calories will have the correct calories, but the macro-nutrients will be wrong.

Typically, everything we consume has calories made up of carbs, fat, or protein. But, alcohol itself (ethanol) has calories. Alcoholic beverages contain calories not associated with carbs, fat, or protein. This makes things confusing when tracking alcohol because these calories can go unaccounted for unless we track them as carbs or fats (not protein!).

The easiest way to do this is to:

Find the total calories of an alcoholic beverage.
Divide the total calories by 4 (if you wish to track the drink as carbs) or 9 (if you wish to track the drink as fat). Why? Carbs have 4 calories per gram and fat has 9 calories per gram.

Let's take a 123-calorie glass of wine.

123/4 would be 31g of carbs
123/9 would be 14g of fat
Or you can even split it down the middle and track half as carbs and half as fat. Divide the calories in half, which gives you 61.5. Then do 61.5/4 and 61.5/9 to give 15g of carbs and 7g of fat.⁠ ⁠

How to input alcohol into the app

Tracking this in the app is easy. Use the quick add feature and input the carbs or fat macros and allow the app to calculate the calories!⁠