Most low-carb diet guides I’ve read say that distilled beverages (whiskey, vodka, etc.) are fine because they don’t raise your blood sugar. However a quick perusal of the metabolism of ethanol says that it’s metabolized as “carbohydrate”; specifically, the final step of the metabolic chain is it’s eventual conversion into acetic acid, which the body’s cells then burn into water and carbon dioxide. I’m wondering just how interequivalent ethanol is with saccharides as far as our metabolism goes. Could you live while completely substituting alcohol with carbohydrates?
That is not correct. Ethanol is not a carbohydrate and is not, for most of the relevant metabolic pathway, metabolized in the same way as one. Yes it is calorific and will eventually be burned and wind up as CO2 and H2O, as will most of almost anything you eat. However, that does not make it a carbohydrate, and no, it will not fill the role of carbohydrates in the diet.
Ethanol is converted to acetyl CoA and shuttled into the Krebs cycle just like most other energy sources. So I guess you could say ethanol is metabolized like a carb not lot as a carb. Ethanol can knock you out of ketosis until it is all metabolized.
The Krebs cycle is not the whole of carbohydrate metabolism, though, just the penultimate stage of extracting energy from (as you say) most of the wide variety of stuff we extract energy from.
I didn’t claim that it was. I said that ethanol is metabolized like a carb. I should have said that ethanol is metabolized like a carb, a fat or a protein in that carbon is shuttled into the Krebs cycle.
And to answer the OPs final question, if you substituted alcohol for the calories you normally got from carbohydrate, you would eventually die from alcoholic liver disease. It might take a while, though. And other nutritional deficiencies would probably kick in, too, due to their use in the alcohol metabolic pathways.
I seem to recall the first studies on alcohol in baboons replaced 1/3 of their calories with alcohol, and ensured the rest of the diet was nutritionally complete. This was sufficient to cause cirrhosis. However, my recollection of the details may be wrong.