Cheapen Your Drinking Experience But Watch the Calories

 One alcohol unit is 10 milliliters (ml) which weighs 8 grams. One gram of pure alcohol has 7 calories.

Alcohol labels usually say "Proof" which is actually the percentage of alcohol multiplied by 2. So if something is 100 Proof, it's 50% alcohol. So 200 Proof is 100% alcohol, and so on. For a complete list of alcohol content, visit the Alcohol Content Database.

Let's say you have a beer with 10% alcohol (20 Proof) in a 12 fluid ounce can. What's 10% of 12? 

12 * 0.10 = 1.2 fluid ounce of alcohol per can. We need to convert this from fluid ounces to milliliters. 1.2 * 29.574 = 35.4882 milliliters of alcohol content. Now we must figure out grams. If 10 ml of alcohol weighs 8 grams, then 1 ml of alcohol weighs 0.8 grams.

Now we take 0.8 * 35.4882 to get the grams of our sample: 28.39056 grams of alcohol in a 12 fluid ounce can of beer with 10% alcohol.

For calories we take 7 calories * 28.39056 grams to get the calories: 198.73392 calories.

Now, the Alcohol Content Database lists beverages by percent of alcohol content. To get the complete guide for liquor bottle sizes, visit TRICORBRAUN LIQUOR BOTTLE SIZES: A COMPLETE GUIDE.

When you compare Everclear which costs around $18-$20 a bottle. Based on the chart below, each bottle will have the equivalent amount of alcohol of around 12 ounce Bud Light. One 12oz bottle of Bud Light averages around $2.99, so 50 Bud Lights would cost around $149.50, unless they were on sale.

Brand	Volume in ml	Proof	Percent	Alcohol in ml	Alcohol in grams	Gram Calories
Everclear	15.00	190.00	0.95	14.25	11.40	79.80
Bud Light	355.00	8.00	0.04	14.20	11.36	79.52

 

The long term costs and savings of Ranch salad dressing

I make home-made Ranch
dressing from scratch now.

I made a recipe of Ranch dressing from a powder package of Hidden Valley brand with Buttermilk and Mayonnaise. The total cost was $6.09 + tax.

It began to dawn on me that I could save money in the long term by making the recipe myself from scratch, but the initial investment would be $24.60+ tax. I had some time so I did a little research and came up with the following table:


I hope this is accurate. The package labels show the net weight and I had to use the Aqua-Calc website to convert to the Volume of each spice. A teaspoon of black pepper doesn't weigh the same as as a teaspoon of chives.

Anyway according to my questionable calculations, by making Ranch salad dressing completely from scratch would save me roughly $2.71 per recipe.

Because each ingredient comes in a different size, I calculated from the ingredient I would only need to buy once, Salt, and extrapolated the total number of purchases of the other ingredients in order to make an even number of complete recipes, 1000. My total savings would be around $2700.00 from not buying a thousand bottles. I would also only generate 489 wasted containers, so it also saves the environ

To Vaccinate or Not to Vaccinate

Influenza: Source: Wikimedia Commons 

Viruses occur in nature everywhere. After being deposited on a hard surface, according to the UK's National Health Service, Cold viruses can survive indoors for up to seven days, especially if the humidity is above 10 percent, according to Popular Science.

When you get vaccinated, your immune system is tuned and prepared for an attack by a specific strain of virus, so it can destroy the virus much more quickly than it would otherwise.

Viruses use your cells as factories to create more viruses, This process goes unnoticed in a person not vaccinated because the influenza virus only uses a small amount of a cell's RNA to reproduce, according to Science Daily. The immune system then reacts much more slowly. As a result, the symptoms of infection appear much later in the period during which an infected person is highly contagious.

Symptoms are not caused by the virus itself, but by the actions of the immune system trying to destroy the virus. In an attempt to rid the body of the virus, the body will produce copious amounts of mucus, and destroy the infected cells which will cause painful inflammation in the damaged tissues.

Vaccinated individuals will have little to no symptoms as their immune systems are at peak performance and will attack when there is very little infection, but that does not mean the viruses are not still hanging around somewhere nearby.

Whether you're vaccinated or not, the viruses are still there. It's a matter of choice whether or not you want to have severe symptoms lasting weeks, or little if any symptoms that last a few days at most.