Well, in a sense alcohol calories do effect weight gain. But it's not the calories, it's the metabolic prioritization of alcohol that causes weight gain.RockiesAdrian wrote:I think soda is disgusting and never drink the stuff. But to say alcohol calories do not affect weight gain/loss seems very hard to believe. Do you have any sources to back up that claim?LURE wrote:Soda has no place in the human diet, if you ask me. The whole beer thing, all the calories in there are like 90% from the alcohol. The body can't store alcohol calories, so it's pointless to count beer and liquor calories. Every alcohol calorie gets burned and removed from the body no matter what you do. It's an interesting physiological misconception that beer and liquor make you fat. Food makes you fat. Alcohol can contribute to weight gain, but it's not the alcohol calories doin it.
In short:
Alcohol is poison. The body therefore prioritizes it as the number one thing in that body that needs to be metabolized and removed once ingested - so that you don't die from it. All alcohol in the body ends up, ultimately, as CO2 and water, in the liver and other tissues. Because it becomes the emergency priority for being metabolized, real food calories get sidelined to a degree and go straight to storage. That's how I've come to understand it.
These sources talk a lot about alcohol metabolism which is the first step in figuring this stuff out:
- https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa72/aa72.htm
- "Alcohol inhibits fat oxidation, suggesting that frequent alcohol consumption could lead to fat sparing, and thus higher body fat in the long term" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4338356/
- Alcohol Metabolic Process - https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications ... 45-255.pdf
Here are some articles that talk about the priority thing with alcohol:
- http://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/ ... olism.html
- http://www.health.com/health/article/0, ... 97,00.html
There's more out there. It's hard to scrounge up good research on google at work but this should give you an idea of how much more complicated it is. The main point I'm making is that its more or less fact that the body can't store alcohol calories. You're body burns them as quickly as it can to remove the poison so you don't die. The many effects of this process on the body though are difficult to fully understand, and research suggests that this is the problem that leads to weight gain; that other calories getting sidelines while the body prioritizes the alcohol. Not to mention the fact people get the munchies when they drink or the effects of drinking lots of sugary cocktails.
Think about an alcoholic who starts replacing meals with alcohol. They would get skinny and jaundiced. Not fat.