Alcoholic drinks have a shit ton of calories, but I personally know many skinny people who drink an insane amount of beer & liquor. Even if they didn’t eat anything, the calories from the drinking alone should be enough for them to put on weight. How come they don’t? Does the body lose it’s ability to take in the energy properly if it’s mostly coming from alcohol?
In: 1535
If you’re from the US:
They are most likely overweight, but you don’t notice it because over 66% of the US is overweight (BMI above 25), and 33% of the US is Obese (BMI over 30).
Additionally, for those that are not overweight, that’s usually because they don’t eat much, since they prefer spending that money on alcohol instead.
(And before you go on a BMI rant, it’s the right tool here, since this goes over the entire population, and you ain’t going to tell me that 33% of the US are athletes.)
Because they don’t eat. Even alcoholic beverages have calories (Not super high) but You would have to drink A LOT even for them to get calorie surplus. When you see overweight people you drink quite a bit. It’s combination of high calorie foods and drinks.
>Even if they didn’t eat anything, the calories from the drinking alone should be enough for them to put on weight
Beer is 43 calories per 100g, meaning that to reach 2000 (~ the daily amount you need) you’d have to drink 4.7 kg of it, aka 4.7 litres, 8.3 UK pints (I don’t know what freedom units for beer are), coming to something like 21 units of alcohol (1 unit = 10 ml or 8 g of ethanol, again I don’t know what freedom units are)
But alcoholics usually move on to wine or spirits. Wine is 83 calories per 100g, so you need 2.4 litres or 4.2 pints (3.2 bottles of 750ml), about 31 units. Vodka is 231 per 100g, giving 0.87 litres or 1.5 pints, about 35 units.
Even 21 units a day is well beyond “normal alcoholism” levels – [this site](https://www.changegrowlive.org/advice-info/coronavirus/alcohol-advice) puts 15 as “likely to be dependent” levels – and 30-35 is madness. UK guidelines at present are to not exceed 14 per week, this would be 150-250 a week.
Essentially: to make up all your calorie needs from alcohol, you are drinking so much that you are gonna be extremely f’d up.
In addition to the sheer volume and everybody fat points –
Malnutrition is common in chronic alcoholics, although its severity may depend on the social characteristics of the patient group under study and their severity of alcohol dependence. General malnutrition is often reflected in body weight loss, mainly of adipose and muscle tissue. This loss of nutritional reserves is partly due to inadequate protein intake in the face of continued alcohol ingestion. However, there is also evidence that ethanol is relatively ineffective as a source of calories, in spite of its high theoretical calorific value. An increased metabolic rate and tissue oxygen consumption following alcohol ingestion, without parallel increases in phosphate bond energy production or anabolic processes demonstrate the poor value of ethanol as an alternative calorie source to carbohydrate, fat or protein. This situation of nutritional imbalance is often compounded in chronic alcoholics by the effects that ethanol has on gastrointestinal function. These include increased mucosal permeability which may lead to ‘leakage’ of nutrients from the blood to the gut lumen, increased gut motility with increased transit times, and impaired salt and water absorption.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4052163/
Edit – sorry I actually didn’t read the sub this was coming from. Explained like youre 5 years into med school
‚Beer gut‘ Happens to early stage alcoholics who still eat a normal diet, and just add excess calories from their drinking.
But those drinks aren’t that calorie dense: once the damage from the alcohol causes appetite loss and you aren’t eating properly anymore, you‘d have to drink crazy (like for an alcoholic crazy) amounts of alcohol to keep up your energy intake.
Additionally alcohol can only properly be used for energy when the body is reasonable well supplied with calories, because it gets shunted into things as acetic acid, which don‘t work just on its own.
Also chronic intake in alcohol causes loss of many vitamins, which again leads to loss of appetite.
The kinds alcoholic who doesn’t lead an active lifestyle and drinks a couple beers or a bottle of wine at night is at a chance of being overweight.
The kind that’s drinking a bottle of vodka and not eating much, is not gonna be overweight for long.
Additionally 2/3 of the population of say the US is overweight in the first place.
Alcohol doesn’t cause my 600 pound life kinds obesity. The beer gut alcoholics would not be noticeable at all with the current rates of sugar addicted obese people
Severe alcoholics often drink mainly hard liquor and don’t eat very much. Liquor is mainly water and alcohol so, compared to something like beer, it doesn’t contain that many calories per unit of alcohol.
For instance, 100 g of vodka is about 230 Calories, so a whole 750-ml bottle (25 fl oz, or”a fifth”) contains about 1700 Calories. Drinking a bottle of vodka a day is rather severe alcoholism, but still leaves a healthy-weight average adult man with about 800 calories of food he can eat without gaining weight. Overweight people burn more calories anyway (just being alive) so they can eat more than that without gaining further weight.
That being said, there are plenty of heavy drinkers who do gain weight from their drinking habit, especially if their drink of choice is beer.
Alcoholics generally lose weight if they give up drinking. I used to drink quite often when I was DJing but I would also be on my feet dancing and sweating for like 8+ hours so I didn’t gain weight. It also motivated me to start jogging so the net gain was less than the calorie usage but it’s not a healthy life style. I felt pretty run down a lot of the time and when I cut out alcohol I found I felt more neutral and better overall.
As you become an alcoholic, you mess up lots of systems in your body, including digestion.
Most long term alcoholics that are thin, is due to a combination of not eating a lot of food, they spend money on alcohol. And getting to the stage where they are not able to digest food, malnutrition and chronic diarrhoea are common in severe alcoholics.
Overweight alcoholics do exist, but they are usually in the class of functional alcoholics. If they are functional enough to hold down a job and pay bills they may not even be recognised as alcoholics by the people around them. So some selection bias may be taking place.
Some alcoholics will afford to drink but not eat. Wake up drink. Grab free oatmeal at work for breakfast. Have a few lunch time beers and spend $2 on a mcdouble. Get out of work grab a case of beer and a bag of chips after working a whole shift off 1 sandwich and a small bowl of oatmeal.
I am an extreme alcoholic who is 11 months sober. Extreme, prolonged alcoholism can actually prevent your body from absorbing nutrients, and make you lose weight. I was drinking nearly a half gallon of vodka a day, and I developed neuropathy and ataxia, partly because alcohol is a neurotoxin that deteriorates your brain, and also because my body had become deprived of vitamin b-12 for a dangerously long period.
I lost an incredible amount of weight due to alcoholism, and I ate nothing but fast-food and processed/canned foods, well above my recommended daily calorie intake.
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