I’m trying to lose weight and occasionally have 1-3 glasses of wine (fitting into my caloric intake of course). Just wanted to know if this would impact my weight any differently than if I ate the same calories of sugar. Don’t worry, I’m getting enough nutrition from the loads of veggies and meats and grains I eat the rest of the time.
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Fructose is processed by the liver just as alcohol is. In fact, you get the same chronic (long term) conditions with too much fructose as you do with alcoholism, you just don’t get the acute (short term) side effects of being drunk and having hangovers.
Edit:
Wrote the wrong sugar name, the talk I based this on states fructose not sucrose. https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM
Edit2:
Take my comment with a grain of salt. u/Deus-Ex-Lacrymae has a good breakdown of the parts of the talk I’m referring to and critique on my misunderstanding/overstatement.
A calorie is a calorie. Sugar is less calorically dense at 4kcal per gram whereas alcohol is circa 7kcal per gram iirc. I don’t actually recall from undergrad human physiology and metab what the metabolic pathways are strictly for extracting energy for alcohol but it’s something I should revisit (and would right now if I wasn’t drifting off to sleep!).
The important thing you’ve covered insofar as weight loss is IIFYM. If It Fits Your Macros (calorie goal, moreso). Some alcohol intake per week is great for you, and with anything else – moderation is key. Simple thermodynamics dictates weight loss.
Kinda yes and no. Yes your body does process alcohol calories differently from carbs, but it processes everything differently. It’s all about efficiency. It takes a different amount of calories to extract one calorie from carbs then it does from protein then from fat or alcohol. At the scale we’re talking about for powering a human body, though, the calorie numbers listed are close enough that you’ll probably do alright if you track reasonably well. The big deal you’ve probably heard about alcohol calories was part of a campaign to let people know they exist. This is something that most people don’t ever consider, everything you drink that isn’t just water has calories, even things that are advertised as zero calorie (they’re allowed a small variance for “error”).
So yeah, if you’re taking the wine you drink into account in your diet you won’t be any more impacted then you would be by all the other things you consume whose numbers aren’t reported quite exactly.
Ethanol is transformed into acetaldehyde by the liver and then transformed into acetic acid by the liver too, but in a 2nd independant step. Acetic acid is a short chain fatty acid and it’s processed the same way as any fatty acid, but it circulates directly in the blood rather than being packaged in lipoproteins.
The calories from ethanol have the same effect on your weight than any other calories (and it’s about 7 Cal per gram vs 4 for carbonydrates and 9 for fatty acid). You get to have also the psychoactive effects of alcohol and the highly toxic effects of acetaldehyde though, which you don’t get if you take sugar or fat.
Hmmm, am I wrong in assuming thay the calories in wine derive from carbs/sugar? Much in the same way that grape juice has “natural” sugars?
Not sure how much sugar is in the standard pour of wine, but I’d wager its not a little ammount.
If you are trying to loose weight and find yourself having difficulty doing so, pin pointing where your calorie intake occurs is a good first step.
I would think the calories with a glass of wine ar especially problematic since we typically consume wine in the evenning right? This requires the sugars to be metabolized over night while we sleep. Instead of a soda in the morning which at least can be burned off through daily actovity…activity…. to some extent at least.
But, I’m not really sure.
yah, they hurt your liver, leading to a large variety of detrimental health effects both before and after being broken down into usable calories. Alcohol is worse for you than ANY other legal otc drug; not counting the physical and emotional damage caused to others by drunk people doing dumb shit.
please stop drinking; it’s bad for you, and it’s bad for society.
The primary difference between alcohol calories and sugar is that processing alcohol takes about twice as much water as processing sugar does, which is part of why alcohol dehydrates you (in addition to the fact it is a diuretic.)
Processing alcohol also involves the liver to a greater extent, which can have some impacts on blood chemistry, but when it comes to things like diabetes risk, alcohol is very similar to sugar.
Alcohol is processed into sugar. You have an enzyme in your liver that turns alcohol into acetylhyde into acetate (I believe), and eventually into glucose. So it’s sugar with more steps. Otherwise, there’s no difference.
Not all of it is processed. You will pee out a not insignificant amount of the metabolic states before the glucose is available.
The three types of calories are carbs, proteins, and fats. Carbs are converted into fat, but your body can’t make carbs from fat. Proteins can be converted into carbs, but they release ketones when they do. This is why people on ultra low carb diets suffer from ketosis. It has neurological and physical side effects.
Alcohol(Ethanol) is preprocessed into acetic acid, which then enters our normal metabolic pathway of sugar breakdown. So in essence yes, they will still provide calories.
There is a ton of misinformation in this comment section most of which is completely wrong.
When it comes to weight and disease, CALORIES AREN’T EQUAL.
Yes, calories from alcohol are processed differently, use different metabolic pathways, trigger different hormone responses, etc, all of which affect weight gain differently.
If you want to learn more, read Metabolical by Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist who discusses how different foods are metabolized.
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