Diet Prosecco Is the Reason We Can't Have Nice Things
It was bound to happen sooner or later: diet prosecco is a real thing, and it's about to be everywhere. This might sound like a familiar tactic: In the heyday of the '90s diet versions of everything were everywhere. Before the rise of Atkins, everything was fat-free, and thus healthier, even though the way they replaced fat was with a heaping amount of sugar which—spoiler—is not better for you. I remember happily munching Snackwell's cookies, and even trying the short-lived Lay's WOW chips, fat-free potato chips that had the unfortunate side effect of acting like a laxative if you ate too many. I grew up hating milk because thought everything was like the skim milk version of the stuff. The point is, modified "diet" version of things are nothing new—Bud Light launched in 1982, and so did Diet Coke. And I suppose it was really only a matter of time, in the post-Skinny Girl era, when we would be introduced to the era of diet wine.
Indeed, diet Prosecco is here. Or, specifically, diet prosecco is in London. Gancia Leggero, from the winemaker Casa Gancia, is a prosecco that has less sugar and fewer calories than ordainary prosecco. They're not the first winemaker to try this—in 2015 Skinny Fizz introduced a prosecco that had less sugar, too. But Gancia Leggero is making waves by being introduced to 18 London pubs, where post-Brexit prices for prosecco are climbing. The drink is 11.5 percent alcohol, and is 65 calories per glass.
That's pretty good, until you consider that regular prosecco is just 80 calories a glass. (This is also the reason that people think that whole milk is like, 100% fat. It's 4% fat. That's really not that much.) Prosecco is already a fairly light choice—the caloric difference between the modified prosecco and regular prosecco is pretty tiny, basically the equivalent of five M&Ms. The average 150 pound person will burn off those calories by walking three or four minutes. It's a really, really tiny difference. If you're on a very strict diet or need to be very careful with your sugar intake, sure, that can be helpful.
But for the rest of us, people who would be drinking prosecco anyway at a special occasion or just a Thursday night, please do not buy into diet prosecco. This is a bad idea, and it's one that's gaining steam. Diet prosecco isn't even like having diet birthday cake—it's more like spilling 1/16 of every drink you order to eliminate calories. Just, why? Have a glass of prosecco. If you want to limit your calorie intake, perhaps do not have nine glasses of prosecco.
Please let's remember that diet culture in the west is a really insidious, diseased thing, that doesn't do all that much to help people's health so much as punish them for having a body. These kind of workarounds feed the kind of culture that celebrates a woman for losing weight without exercising... because she had cancer. Diet culture is also deeply sexist—there's a reason that diet prosecco is being marketed mostly to women. Many companies make enormous amounts of money by making women feel insecure and vulnerable about their normal bodies. Honestly, diet prosecco is not going to make a difference in your life. Do not buy into it. Health is a broad category. It's different for everyone. You get to decide what you put in your body, and what works for you. But on the whole? Just get plain prosecco.
