Tuesday 4 September 2012

Alcohol Part 1 - Fat Gain

Alcohol is one of the most misunderstood substances regarding fitness and health. While people state it has miraculous fat gain properties they tend to forget about the kebab and chips they had on the way home. Being at university, you're going to get ruined by alcohol at some point, how to fit this into a healthy lifestyle is what I'm going to delve into here.

The first thing people note about alcohol is that it's valued at 7kcal per g, this is about 55 calories for your typical 25ml shot of vodka. 20 shots later you've consumed what is apparently 1100 calories of vodka, or about 31% of what could be a lb (3500kcal) of fat gained. This is not even taking into account any extra food consumed on a night out or mixers. If this was the case though, most students would be incredibly overweight by now.

When alcohol is metabolised, the majority of it is metabolised into Acetate. Acetate is toxic to the body which gives it a much higher priority to be processed than any other macro-nutrient, i.e. fat/carbs/protein. Due to this any fatty acid molecules that are waiting to be processed are sent to fat cells for storage (1+2). It is the precedence of Acetate that causes the suppression of fatty acid metabolism that leads to vast amounts of weight gain with alcohol. When the average diet of the UK is made up of 50%+ fat and the majority of late night post drinking snacking is also high in fat, it's easy to see why alcohol can lead to rapid weight gain.

Only a very small amount of the processed alcohol is left as fatty acids. The majority of the supposed 7kcal per g is lost in the metabolic process that converts alcohol to Acetate and the thermogenic effect of alcohol, ever not feel cold when drunk? This gives alcohol itself a low energy yield, as in, very little of it can be stored as fat. This puts the actual energy value of alcohol closer to the value of 1.1kcal per g and therefore puts the value of your 20 drinks to 172 calories of storable energy from the alcohol (1). Quite a large difference to the 1100 calories listed on the bottle.


Were Acetate not a toxic substance that has to be removed from the body, the full chemical reaction would be able to take place, you would then get the supposed full 7kcal of energy yield out of alcohol. The Acetate that is produced does eventually gets metabolised into carbon dioxide and water and excreted. This also explains why alcoholics are often below average BMI in spite of consuming excessive amounts of alcohol calories.

So now we know what happens when you drink, how do we stop the fatty acids being stored? Quite simple, we lower dietary fat intake to preferably less than 40g and keep our carbohydrates below 200g on the day we're drinking, if there's no queue of fatty acids then there's far less chance of them being stored (4). This is basically a simple form of damage limitation ensuring that any unwanted fat gain will be minimal. Note that protein isn't mentioned, you can consume as much protein as you want, protein itself cannot be processed into anything that could be stored as fat, (5) so eat your chicken. It probably goes without saying that you should avoid full sugar mixers and full sugar beers, as these add empty calories and can quickly add up to vast amounts of carbohydrates.

To conclude, alcohol is more than likely not the cause of rapid weight gain. An imbalanced diet swaying towards high fats or general caloric excess however when combined with alcohol is obesity waiting to happen.

Summary -
To minimise fat gains through alcohol consumption, control dietary fat/carbohydrate intake to less than 40g of fat and 200g of carbohydrates in the 12 hours prior to drinking. This is also why eating is cheating.





1. Pubmed (1994) Effect of alcohol on postmeal fat storage. [Online]. Available at

2. Pubmed (1979) Effects of ethanol on lipid metabolism. [Online]. Available at

3. Lide, D. (2000) CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. 81st edn. CRC Press

4. Berkhan, M. (2010) 'Truth about alcohol, fat loss and muscle' [Online]. Available at http://www.leangains.com/2010/07/truth-about-alcohol-fat-loss-and-muscle.html

5. Ophardt, C. (2003) Protein Metabolism. [Online]. Available at http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/630proteinmet.html


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