Every evening before bedtime I find myself imbibing in at least one alcoholic drink. Which of the following will not make me as fat as the others?
I’m good with any of them. If I had to choose only one for every evening henceforth, which is consistent with not getting so fat?
Googling produces lots of links which tend to suggest:
Wine - 25 to 35 calories (kCal) per oz.
Beer - 10 to 12 calories per oz.
Whiskey - 60 to 65 calories per oz.
You don’t say how large your glasses of wine will be; 4 to 6 oz seems typical, which means anything from 200 to 420 cal. for 2 glasses.
A “tall” Asahi is probably 500ml (16.9oz), so that’s between 169 and 203 cal.
A standard shot of whiskey is 1.5oz; two would offer between 180 and 195 cal.
Whiskey has no carbs; beer and wine do, if that matters.
Well, that settles it. If my wife has another occurance of gestational diabetes, I’m only givin’ her whisky! [Sorry, that’s the first bizarro thing that comes to mind when I hear the dreaded word “carbs”. That, and “ketones”. Brrr-rr.]
Thanks for y’all’s answers.
True by the FDA definition of carbohydrate, but it’s really a silly distinction (though relevant for diabetics). By some definitions, alcohol is a carbohydrate! And more relevantly for a discussion like this, alcohol is digested and metabolized in the same way that carbohydrates are. Both get broken down to the same intermediates pretty early in the process.
Admittedly this is a pedantic nitpick, but it always drives me crazy when I see advertisements for “low carb” or “zero carb” alcoholic beverages. There ain’t any such thing as a diet beer. Alcohol has calories!
What they mean is that alcohol does not provoke an insulin response and can be used by those on low glycemic index diets, like diabetics or Atkins eaters or the South Beach folks. It’s too many words for a advertisment though, and why confuse people with a lot of facts they couldn’t even understand, much less interpret?
Oh, I know you’re right, and it’s not pedantic…I am curious, though; if we know that alcohol is digested and metabolized as a carbohydrate, then surely there exists somewhere an accurate measurement of precisely what amount of carbohydrate-equivalent is digested/metabolized when drinking alcohol?
<cynic>Why indeed, when marketers can just exploit the “carbs are bad, mmkay?” attitude to convince someone on a diet that they can drink all night without worrying about those silly calories?</cynic>
Like I said, it’s a useful thing to say to diabetics (though hopefully they would already know this).
As to the carbohydrate equivalence of alcohol, really you just need to look at the calories, since alcohol hops into the metabolic process right when sugars are being converted to energy. Alcohol won’t change blood sugar levels directly, so there’s no insulin response.
ETA: My little rant wasn’t intended at anyone in this thread. Y’all clearly know what you’re talking about. It’s the marketers that annoy me…
Eh, rant away…
I’m just curious what precisely is the measurement of alcohol’s carbohydrate effect. How many grams of carb equivalent (for lack of a better term) does a couple of shots of liquor have? Unless an expert stops by, I reckon I’m going to have to do a bit of research.
Well, your body likes burning carbs first, then fat, so lowering carbs leads to burning more fat and the whiskey is your best choice.
HOWEVER, your body likes burning alcohol even better than carbs, so as long as you’re drinking, you’re not burning fat. So the very best choice is no booze at all, weightwise.
I’ve been trying think of a way that this might be true, but no matter how I look at it, it seems obviously incorrect. There’s a good summary of alcohol metabolism here.
By what definitions is alcohol considered a carbohydrate? The defining feature of a carbohydrate is that it is an aldehyde/ketone. How can an alcohol be a ketone? Either the oxygen is double bonded or it isn’t, surely.
When I do a Google search on “Alcohol is a carbohydrate” it seems to be all and diet pages and similar. When I try the search in .edu sites I get two returns, one from a column in university newspaper claiming that alcohol is laid down as body fat (which we know is impossible) and another from a play script. When I try “alcohol is not a carbohydrate” I get Sheldon H. Gottlieb, MD, FAAC, a cardiologist at John Hopkins. Dr. Gottlieb explains that alcohol is not a carbohydrate, although many people think it is.
Alcohol isn’t initially digested the way that carbohydrates are. Alcohol passes through the gut wall directly, carbohydrates usually only after enzymatic digestion, and always via pore proteins and active transport.
It doesn’t get broken down to the same intermediates very early. Even proteins are broken down to the same intermediates as carbohydrate earlier than alcohol. The first common product in the metabolism of alcohol and carbohydrate is citrate and, as you can see from the diagram in the link, that’s a long way down the chain for carbohydrate. The first common product for protein and alcohol is acetyl co-A, which is two steps earlier than citrate. If alcohol and carbohydrate can be said to get broken down to the same intermediates very early then the same is even more true of proteins and carbohydrate.
Can you explain by what standards you conclude that alcohol is a carbohydrate, or that it is initially digested the same was as carbohydrate, or that it gets broken down to the same intermediates very early? Because I’m having a hard time seeing how any of those statements could be interpreted as being accurate.
I don’t understand the question. Alcohol isn’t a a carbohydrate. It isn’t metabolised like a carbohydrate. The question is like asking what is the measurement of protein’s carbohydrate effect. Doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The only sensible comparison I can think of are the calorific values.
The human body cannot burn fat well when alcohol is present. Drinking even just a little has a dramatic effect on fat burning, far worse than simply drinking the equivalent number of calories in sugary drinks (in non-diabetic individuals at least).
Source: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
De novo lipogenesis, lipid kinetics, and whole-body lipid balances in humans after acute alcohol consumption
Scott Q Siler, Richard A Neese and Marc K Hellerstein
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/70/5/928?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=lipid+alcohol&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=HWCIT
In short, as soon as the alcohol’s down the hatch, your body pulls the plug on fat burning. Furthermore, considering the fact carbohydrates have around 4 kilocalories per gram and alcohol contains 7, you’re better off with the weaker stuff. Straight high-proof alcohol such as whiskey is by far the worst choice. If fat loss (or even maintenance) is at all important to you, it’s in your best interests to cut alcohol from your diet as much as possible. Social drinking on an occasional weekend won’t kill you, but if you want my opinion, think twice before using the common saying that “a glass of wine a day is good for you” as justification for destructive behavior.
Thanks, [cc] !
[QUOTE=’[cc]
;11236532’]The human body cannot burn fat well when alcohol is present.
[quote]
:eek: I did not know that.
But then, back to the original question, won’t the time taken to consume/excrete the alcohol play major role in its effect? eg a shot of whiskey drunk in 10 seconds and absorbed excreted over the next hour will presumably only inhibit lipolysis for an hours. A glass of wine sipped over 30 minutes and absorbed over 2 hours will inhibit lipoloysis for 2.5 ours.
Right?
(BTW, I have no idea if the alcohol in wine is absorbed slower, but being diluted with more water makes me assume this. And we all know what assume does.)
Blake has already commented on this, but still.
Alcohol is not a carbohydrate.
Not chemically. Alcohols contain a characteristic OH group.
Not enzymatically. Alcohols are broken down by different enzymes than carbs, before they arrive at a common product, acetyl-CoA.
Not digestively. They are digested by different methods, and have different effects on the body.
I did not read the article thoroughly, but I think you might be over-interpreting what the experiments mean.
The body needs energy all the time. So it can either burn from the fat reserves, or from newly ingested energy. A question to ponder is, what happens when you ingest alcohol, is it converted to fats, or is it burned immediately for fuel?
This article concludes that it is almost solely used for immediate fuel.
“The maximum amount of newly synthesized fatty acids released into the circulation was 0.8 g, representing <5% of the ingested ethanol load.”
What happens to the alcohol instead is that it is converted to acetate, which the cells use for fuel. This acetate fuel in the cells, inhibit their breakdown of lipids for fuel. They don’t need it now.
So, alcohol is not converted to fats, but it inhibits fat breakdown. Overall, is this “good” or “bad” for your fat levels? I don’t think the article makes any comment on that. The only relevant lines I noticed were:
“The response of the liver to the availability of surplus 2-carbon units after ethanol consumption is in many ways analogous to the hepatic response to carbohydrate overfeeding (39). Addition of surplus dietary carbohydrate energy expands hepatic glycogen stores, but does not result in a quantitatively important stimulation of DNL. Instead, hepatic release of glucose in the postabsorptive state is greatly increased (39, 64), leading to increased serum insulin concentrations, reduced lipolysis, and replacement of lipid by carbohydrate in the whole-body fuel mixture.”
In other words, the overall impact of carbs and alcohols is similar in this aspect, although achieved by different mehcanisms.
Many people believe that carbohydrate is anything that contains carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (and calories). If you thought that, then you’d think alcohol is a carbohydrate, but you’d be wrong. By that definition, fat is also a carbohydrate.