Alcohol Affects Your Figure, Increases Body Fat and Causes Weight Gain

So I was driving along in my car, listening to National Public Radio, shaking my head at the reports on Afghanistan and the economy, when suddenly I was assaulted with the worst news ever: “Having a mere three ounces of alcohol,” intoned a diet book author being interviewed, “reduces fat-burning by about a third.” Now, if there are two things I love in life, it’s drinking wine and burning fat. Hearing they were in opposition was like when I heard Jon and Kate were splitting up: How could you choose between the two when they’re both so delightful? The author continued, “If you’re trying to lose weight, you probably need to stop drinking alcohol. You booze, you don’t lose.”

It’s not like I thought cabernet was made with Splenda. I knew it was calorific, but the idea that it was double-crossing me by slowing my body’s ability to burn fat was almost too much to bear. I normally believe anything NPR tells me, but I decided to do a little fact-checking. I mean, beer is among the top 10 energy sources of Americans (right up there with soda, doughnuts, cheese spread, and corn chips—and, no, I am not making that up). Since the majority of Americans need to lose weight (last count, 67 percent of us are overweight or obese), and health officials are always looking for reasons to tell people to stop drinking (don’t drink if you’re pregnant, don’t drink if you have breast cancer, don’t drink and drive, nag, nag, nag), wouldn’t we have heard by now if Bud Light were some evil fat-storing demon foodstuff? And beyond that, moderate drinking is linked with lower risk for heart disease and diabetes and increased levels of “good” HDL cholesterol—how could it do that and be working overtime to make you fat, too? As I suspected, the story is more complicated than the diet book author suggested—although, sadly, she was not totally off base. How alcohol affects your figure depends on genetics, your diet, your gender, and your habits.

When you drink alcohol, it’s broken down into acetate (basically vinegar), which the body will burn before any other calorie you’ve consumed or stored, including fat or even sugar. So if you drink and consume more calories than you need, you’re more likely to store the fat from the Cheez Whiz you ate and the sugar from the Coke you drank because your body is getting all its energy from the acetate in the beer you sucked down. Further, studies show that alcohol temporarily inhibits “lipid oxidation”— in other words, when alcohol is in your system, it’s harder for your body to burn fat that’s already there. Since eating fat is the most metabolically efficient way to put fat on your body—you actually use a small amount of calories when you turn excess carbs and protein into body fat, but excess fat slips right into your saddlebags, no costume change necessary—hypothetically speaking, following a high-fat, high-alcohol diet would be the easiest way to put on weight.

This does not mean that you cannot drink moderately and lose weight. In one 2004 study, when 49 overweight Germans were randomly assigned to one of two1,500-calorie diets—one including a glass
of white wine a day and the other a glass of grape juice—the wine group actually lost a slightly larger (albeit statistically insignificant) amount of weight.

How Alcohol Affects Your Figure

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