What alcoholic drink has the least affect on or interference with blood sugar, insulin, and anti-depressants?
WRS/Thû
I would imagine it’s strictly determined by the percentage of alcohol. I would also add that you really shouldn’t be screwing around with this stuff.
I dunno about the effect of alcohol itself on blood sugar, but clearly anything sugary will impact it, so you’re gonna want to stick to stuff like vodka without other carbohydrates in it - assuming alcohol in itself isn’t problematic. Anti-depressants, OTOH, cause problems with the metabolism of alcohol. I was on Lexapro for awhile, and alcohol tended to make me quite sick. I don’t know what kind of answer you’re expecting here - alcohol is alcohol. There’s no drink that’s going to magically contain alcohol without, you know, requiring your body to metabolize alcohol. What do you expect here? How could one’s choice of drinks effect the action of alcohol within the body?
It was my understanding, and I may be wrong, that different alcoholic beverages affected one’s body in different ways. Some are more sugary than others, some affect the body faster than others, etc.
When I drink grape juice, for example, my blood sugar spikes up. I am assuming that drinking red wine would do the same.
Although now when I think about it, all alcoholic beverages are made from starch-heavy (and, thus, carb-heavy) stuff - grapes, potatos, rice, barley, etc. - so their affect on blood sugar levels would be similar.
What about insulin? Does alcohol affect insulin? How? I know alcohol somehow gets into the blood, but what after that? How does it affect insulin exactly?
WRS/Thû - this alcohol is a mysterious thing indeed
Alcohol isn’t metabolized in the same way sugar is. In fact, it isn’t metabolized as a carbohydrate.
Distilled alcohol has no sugar (it has alcohol)
Non-distilled alcohol, beer and wine, have some carbohydrates, which are in the form of simple sugars that escaped the fermentation process. The amount varies, so read the label.
I know this doesn’t answer the spirit of the question, but I’m not sure what you want to know.
BTW, grapefruit juice tends to inhibit the metabolism of certain anti-depressants, and of course, anti-depressants should not be used with alcohol, as they may intensify the effects…
I will add, that alcohol, even though it isn’t metabolized as a carbohydrate, isn’t recomended for diabetics, since it can cause unpredictable swings in blood sugar, and insulin metabolism.
What the (distilled) alcohol is made from is relevant only to taste, and, IMO, not much. Its all C[sub]2[/sub]H[sub]6[/sub]O which is Ethyl Alcohol or ETOH.
Not the case alcohols created by fermentation, since conversion from sugar to ETOH is incomplete, some of the charactistics of the original fruit are present.
Grapefruit interacts with other drugs as well, the antihistamine, Seldane™ was an example. It caused cardiac arrhythmias in some people (me, for instance) went grapefruit was in the diet. Because of this, its no longer available in the US, but I believe its still being sold in Canada.
There has never been comprehensive studies done to determine how foods might interact with various drugs, except to determine if drug uptake is influenced by being taken with or without food in the stomach.
I guess that was a hijack, sorry.
EtOH is EtOH. It’s all the same stuff. It’s pretty obvious which alcoholic beverages are sugary, but here’s a hint: dessert wines, liqueurs, and anything else sweet is sugary. That’s not so hard, is it? Grape juice makes your blood sugar spike because it’s sugary. In fact, it’s about the sweetest juice I can think of. If you’re drinking a red wine that’s comparatively sweet - port or something along those lines - expect the same results. If it’s not sweet at all, that means most of the sugar has been converted to alcohol. These things just depend on the content of the beverage. How much alcohol is in what you’re drinking? How much sugar? There’s nothing mysterious here.
Grape juice is the sweetest? Oy vey! Is there anything I can drink? I was so happy, thinking I’m helping to keep my heart healthy by drinking grape juice. And now, it’s bad. Grape juice, orange juice, carrots - and these are healthy stuff too! Why is it that the healthy stuff I actually like turn out to be bad nonetheless?!
Ah, well.
Now, the sweeter the drink the higher the sugar content; the less sweet the higher the alcohol content. Is there any difference how the body metabolizes sugar versus alcohol? Example: how would the body metabolize red wine differently from vodka? Do the both have different effects on the body?
WRS/Thû - That’s it! I’m going back to drinking only water, milk, chocolate milk, and caffeine-free diet orange soda
I’ve generally found that I wake up with lower blood sugars if I have a few beers during the evening.
You’re probably just going to have to either (a) not drink, (b) drink in moderate amounts and keep careful notes of how it affects you, or © be incautious. I recommend (a) if you’re not the cautious type, and (b) if you are.
It really doesn’t help any that they don’t list nutritional information on alcoholic beverages. I hate that.
Meh. I’m getting battling Google cites for alcohol’s affect on serotonin, but I know that many anti-depressants affect the serotonin system, and many think that alcohol does as well.
I’d have to think that, like the rest of the respondents, that it doesn’t really matter which drink you pick, except the alcohol (and sugar) content. Along with, perhaps, what else you are drinking/eating along with it and how quickly you are consuming, might make a small difference.
I take them all, and my answer is Baccardi and diet Cola.
A rate of 1 oz booze to 12 oz cola @ 1 per hour max.
I’m a couple bubbles off plumb mentally, and no one seems to notice when I have a few of these in me.
Also, I feel ok the next day too.
What? No! Where did you get that? You have a marvelous organ in your mouth known as the tongue. It has sensors that can determine, with a fair amount of precision, both the sugar and the alcohol content of a beverage. Sugar tastes sweet (I’m not aware of any alcoholic beverages with such massive amounts of starches that they skew the numbers much) and alcohol tastes like alcohol. Avoid the sweet things if your blood sugar’s screwy. Avoid too much alcohol if it makes you sick with your brain pills (and like I said, for me, the combination is awful.)
picunurse already pointed out that alcohol is not metabolized as a sugar. There’s basically two enzymes involved - alcohol dehydrogenase, and aldehyde dehydrogenase. They work together to transform alcohol into, eventually, acetic acid, which is harmless. It’s just not metabolized the way sugar is (as in anaerobic respiration, then the Krebs cycle, and all that stuff I’ve mostly forgotten).
Are you asking about insulin and sugar for dietary reasons, or do you have diabetes? Because if you’re curious, I’d recommend eating normally but ingesting a small amount of alcohol to see if it seems to throw your readings off, since picunurse already pointed out that alcohol can do wacky things to blood sugar.
But no, there’s no mysterious difference between different alcohols, and so far as I know, nothing to support folk superstitions about one particular booze making people weepy and another making them violent or anything. Red wine is much less concentrated in alcohol than vodka, and that’s most of the difference. Plus, generally, the darker the alcoholic beverage, the more it’s likely to give you hangovers (since distilled liquors contain little or none of the fermentation products that worsen hangovers.)
It’s likely that red wine contains more sugar than vodka (which oughtn’t contain any; vodka’s as close to a pure mixture of ethanol and water as you’re gonna get) but unless it’s a sweet dessert wine, it still shouldn’t be too much, since the alcohol in it comes from the breakdown of sugar.