Why Alcohol Makes You Fat
“I work out five days a week in the gym lifting weight & doing cardio. I watch what I eat, but I binge drink pretty much every weekend. Is the drinking that bad, or am I doing enough “good stuff” to offset the drinking?”
The above is a question I saw recently on an Internet question & answer site that inspired me to write this article. The answer to this question, quite simply, is yes, the drinking is “that bad”.
One or two drinks won’t do much harm, and may even have some health benefits such as increased HDL (good) cholesterol, but too much alcohol may have a significant negative impact on your health and negate much of your workout benefits. Alcohol is far more harmful than most people think, and it’s very important to understand how it affects you. So, if you’re serious about your weight, body fat percentage, health, fitness, and athletic performance, and want the maximum possible benefit from your fitness program, you should drink alcoholic beverages in moderation or not at all.
Not all is the better choice. Moderation is often defined as one drink for women, two for men. That doesn’t mean you have a license to have 14 drinks per week (or have your week’s worth in 1 night) men! One night out a week of binge drinking can nullify all those hours of sweat in the gym.
The most noticeable (and likely undesirable for many) result of drinking too much alcohol is weight gain. Why does alcohol cause us to gain weight? There are two reasons, and they work together to create that beer belly.
Alcohol is high in calories. Alcohol has the second highest calorie density of all food types. At seven calories per gram, it is the second most calorie dense “nutrient” (fat is number one, at nine calories per gram). Therefore, alcohol contributes a large number of calories to your total daily intake, above and beyond the food you consume. Because alcohol is metabolized by the liver, it is not converted directly into body fat, but this doesn’t mean that drinking alcohol won’t make you fat. Drinks made with soft drinks or juice add even more calories to the total, and even those of who watch what eat and count calories are often unaware of how many extra calories we are drinking.
Alcohol suppresses the body’s ability to burn body fat. The body has no storage capacity for alcohol like it does for carbohydrates and fats. Since alcohol must be detoxified as quickly as possible, its oxidation takes priority over that of other macronutrients. In other words, while the liver is busy metabolizing alcohol, the utilization of fats, carbohydrates, and protein has to be temporarily suppressed. The burning of fat is suppressed the most, because it’s at the bottom of the oxidative hierarchy.
Lyle McDonald, author of “The Ketogenic Diet” says, “The consumption of alcohol will almost completely impair the body’s use of fat for fuel.”
When alcohol is in your system, your body will simply convert more of the food you normally eat into body fat. Regardless of whether the calories come from food or drinks, if you consume more calories than your body needs, the excess will be stored as fat. Since most people usually consume their alcohol in addition to food instead of as a substitute for it, the accumulation of body fat is usually the result. You may have heard that its not the beer that makes you fat, but the beer nuts, and that is to some degree true, but they are actually ganging up on you to make you fat.
If you are a man and want your muscles to show, i.e. looked “ripped”, your body fat percentage should be ten percent or less, and that will be very hard to achieve if you drink alcohol.
So, if you are working out and actually want to see your muscles, remember a six-pack (of beer) will ruin your six-pack (abs).
Alcohol and power equipment using unleaded gas in lawn mowers
t was an unusual sound that greeted me one Saturday morning as I was reading the paper on my patio. I could hear the birds chirping and the squirrels scampering up and down the trees. What I didn’t hear was Tonys mower.
Every Saturday that my neighbor Tom doesn’t golf (and about the only time this happens is when it rains) he is up bright and early mowing his lawn. This morning, however, the sun was shining, I was already on my second cup of coffee and Tom’s mower sat silently in his driveway.
By the time I had finished reading my paper, Tom returned home. Amid a flurry of mumbling and cursing, he refilled his mower’s gasoline tank. Evidently he had spent the last few hours chasing around town for a gallon of leaded gasoline. It seems every station he stopped at had unleaded gasoline with ethanol and he was determined to find leaded gasoline with no alcohol additives.
“Why?” I asked him with a chuckle. “The old Briggs & Stratton engine on that mower will run fine with unleaded gas.”
My remark flustered Tom. He had always used leaded gasoline, he said. So had his father. And his grandfather. I didn’t need to remind Tom that times have changed, but I reminded him anyway.
Lead was originally added to gasoline as an octane enhancer. For each gram of lead added to a gallon of gasoline, the octane rating goes up about six octane numbers. Engines require certain minimum levels of octane to run smoothly and resist knocking.
Concern about the emissions released from leaded gasoline encouraged the Environmental Protection Agency to call for a reduction in leaded gasoline. In some states, such as California, you can no longer purchase leaded gasoline.
As unleaded gasoline has become the standard, petroleum refiners have looked to other additives to help keep gasoline octane numbers at leaded standards. Aromatics and alcohols have been the most popular choices. Aromatics, such as benzene and toluene, have high octane levels. The EPA has approved using several alcohols and ethers in unleaded gasoline. Ethanol and methyl tertiary butyl ethers (MTBE) are the two most popular additives.
Ethanol gained popularity as an additive in the late 1970s when it was blended with gasoline to create gasohol. This 90-percent gasoline, 10-percent ethanol mixture was seen as a gasoline extender during the gasoline shortages of the ’70s.
Alcohol and Water Don’t Mix
Devotees of Scotch and water should be advised they may never attain the perfect blend. Scientists have used the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to study the electronic states of methanol, the simplest of the alcohols, both in and out of solution with water; they have shown that, at the molecular level, alcohol and water don’t completely mix.
“Nobody has ever tasted a microscopically perfect mix of alcohol and water,” says ALS scientist Jinghua Guo, one of the leaders of this research. “We found that the mixing of alcohol and water on the microscopic level is incomplete no matter how long you wait. However, the most important scientific message from our study is that we have established a tool to probe the molecular properties of liquids and solutions, something that until now has been difficult to obtain.”
Imbibers have long been combining alcohol and water in myriad beverage concoctions. Mixing wine with water was a custom of the ancient Greeks from at least Homer’s time; in fact the Greeks thought drinking unmixed wine led to insanity. Scientists, for entirely different reasons, have spent the past four decades studying how alcohol and water mix at the molecular level. Alcohol in water is one of the fundamental liquid-liquid solutions endemic to countless chemical and biological processes. Until now, however, experimental data on the molecular properties that emerge from such solutions came primarily from neutron diffraction analysis and sent mixed messages.
“Our knowledge about the geometry and electronic structure of molecules in the liquid phase has been very limited,” says Guo. “Not only does the molecular arrangement change on a very fast time scale but the properties of the individual molecules are constantly changing.”
One big mystery has been the fact that when alcohol and water mix, the disorder, or entropy, of the resulting system does not increase as expected for ideal solutions.
At the microscopic level, a complete mixing of alcohol and water would entail the two molecules coming together at random to form a single liquid phase without interacting with one another. This means entropy for an alcohol-water solution should substantially increase over the entropy for pure acohol. To find out why it does not, Guo and his collaborators turned to the ALS — an electron accelerator and storage ring optimized for the production of x-ray and ultraviolet light, pulsed on a picosecond timescale.
Working at an ALS beamline and experiment station known as the Soft-X-Ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy Facility, the collaboration studied the absorption and emission of low energy (soft) x-rays by liquid methanol in and out of solution with water. While methanol is not used in beverages, its molecular behavior when mixed with water is expected to be the same as that of ethanol, the drinkable form of alcohol. The results of this study were reported in the October 10, 2003 issue of Physical Review Letters.
“We found that the structure of liquid methanol at room temperature is a combination of rings and chains, each made up of either 6 or 8 methanol molecules,” Guo says. “When water is added, the methanol chains interact with water molecule clusters of different sizes. This bends the chains into stable open-ring structures. The formation of new ordered structures in which both water and methanol molecules take part means that the two liquids mix very little on the microscopic level.”
Coauthoring the Physical Review Letters paper with Guo were Yi Luo, Stepan Kastanov, and Hans Agren from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, Andreas Augustsson, Jan-Erik Rubenson, and Joseph Nordgren from Uppsala University in Sweden, and David Shuh of Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division.
The Soft-X-Ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy facility, Beamline 7.0.1, is a collection of experimental stations which use light that is extracted from the stored ALS electron beam via an undulator magnet. This very bright, highly coherent, pulsed light is ideal for investigating the electronic, structural, and dynamic properties of molecules even when they are in the liquid state.
In an earlier study, Guo and his collaborators had used the same ALS beamline to study the geometry and electronic structure of pure liquid water at room temperature. They found that water molecules formed cluster structures, with hydrogen bonds serving as the glue that holds these clusters together. These hydrogen bonds, however, rapidly break and reform, so that at any given moment there are “free-swimming” water molecules present in liquid water. Because these hydrogen-bonded clusters interact with methanol chains in alcohol and water solutions, there are never any free-swimming water molecules present. This helps explain why entropy decreases for such solutions.
“The rings formed when alcohol and water are mixed are stable structures because the hydrogen bonds are saturated,” says Guo. “One would expect to see even further reductions in the entropy of the system if there were more methanol and water molecules forming highly ordered structures.”
So does this mean that those who like their Scotch mixed with water can never hope to achieve the perfect blend? It is difficult to say, according to Guo.
“If we mix alcohol and water at an elevated temperature, we may expect to see different molecular structures in the mixture,” says Guo. “Many years ago, researchers used lasers to induce reactions in liquors and were able to alter the smell for a short time. However, I am not sure people ever tasted such a liquor.”
Principles of Drug & Alcohol Rehab in the 21st Century-10 Critical Questions Re: Effective Treatment
Alcoholism and drug addiction have reached epic proportions in the 21st century. Data continues to show that substance abuse contributes greatly to hospital and prison occupancy, dramatically decrease workplace productivity, and are a leading contributor to fatalities in the United States. Alcohol consumption is the third most leading preventable cause of death in America. (Journal of the American Medical Association, 2004). People from every race, age and socio-economic background are becoming increasingly addicted to such drugs as prescription drugs, i.e. Vicodin, Oxycontin, Valium, Xanax, and many more, Crack, Crystal Meth, Heroin, Alcohol and Cocaine. As a result of alcohol and drug abuse, families are being wrecked apart and children are being exposed and/or endangered. An estimated 6.6 million children under the age of 18 live in households with at least one alcoholic parent, according to the NIAAA.
The most widely known and therefore used “treatment†is AA, or other 12-step program. Unfortunately, according to the current research, the statistics are less than encouraging. According to many government and independent surveys, including one by AA’s own General Service Office, AA has a success rate of around 5% for those who can make it their first year. In other words, 95% of its participants will be gone before one year can even be attained. Yet, 93-97% of the treatment centers in the US are STILL using primarily 12-step programs for treatment. While this might have been acceptable in the 1930’s, when there were no other options, but this is now 2006, where much research has revealed many wonderful alternatives, ones that are taken for granted in most other states.
Fortunately, there are treatment programs that ARE taking what the past three decades of research has shown, and have developed a much more effective program as a result of this. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “No single treatment program is right for everybody. Matching the treatment program to each individual’s needs is critical to success.†In other words, the best predictor for your success is your ability to choose your own program, and set your own goals. Therefore, if it is your choice to go into a treatment program, please ask the following questions, ensuring that an appropriate drug and alcohol program is chosen that will meet the particular needs of the person entering the program.
Drug and alcohol treatment facility: Critical Questions to Ask:
1. What kinds of treatment programs do they offer? Is it primarily 12-step based, or do they offer other self-help options as well, i.e., SMART Recovery, SOS, or Women/Men for Sobriety? Do they match treatment settings, interventions and services to each individual’s particular problems and needs, since this is critical to one’s ultimate success in returning to productive functioning in the family, workplace and society?
2. Does the program address multiple needs of the individual, not just his or her drug use, such as any associated medical, psychological, social, vocational and legal problems?
3. What types of credentials does the staff have, such as doctors, counselors, and anyone else who has contact with the clients, and what is the ratio between the staff and clients?
4. Is there a doctor on the treatment’s premises 24 hours a day, or just a couple times a week to dole out medication?
5. What is the treatment program’s philosophy or theory towards addiction? Is it religious, bio-psycho-social, psychological, neurological, physical and psychological, trauma-based (addiction that has stemmed from a sole traumatic event in one’s life), and does their particular approach suit your own personality, beliefs and values, or is it one that you can believe in, and rebuild your life based on it?
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6. Does the treatment program detailed, positive approaches towards treatment, using up-to-date methods, such as motivational therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, stress personal responsibility, this is a disease/not a disease but a choice among many others?
7. Do you think that this approach resonates with you, or your loved one, that may need inpatient help?
8. Does the program offer counseling (individual or group) and other behavioral therapies, where issues of motivation, building life-skills to resist drug and alcohol use, relapse prevention, improving problem-solving skills, and facilitation of interpersonal relationships and ability to function in the family and community often take place?
9. How does the drug rehab program assist an individual during the withdrawal process, i.e. is medical treatment for withdrawal provided, or must this be done somewhere else, prior to entering the facility?
10. To what extent is the family involved in the treatment process?
Again, alcoholism and drug addiction has reached epic proportions in the 21st century, and we can no longer afford to ignore the research that has been going on for over three decades, which provides scientific evidence that the 12-step programs have only about a 5%-20% success. Therefore, it is imperative that addiction professionals and treatment programs continuously change and reevaluate the effectiveness of their treatment approaches. If a drug rehab is determined to be necessary, asking the critical questions in this article will at least give you the important information of whether or not they are a simply a traditional treatment center, only offering only one option, the 12-step method, or whether they have taken all the vital research into account and have now incorporated many different alternative modalities into their program.
Recovery From Drug and Alcohol Addiction
Recovery from drug addiction and alcohol addiction is stressful in the best of circumstances. The addict/alcoholic wishes that they could fast forward time and have all the past negative history behind them, overnight in fact would be preferable. The watchful eyes of family, friends and employers take their toll and the minutes seem to tick by in slow motion as the discomfort for all involved still remains. One important thing for the recovering addict to remember is that their concept of time is a bit warped.
Take for instance their using. If you ask an addict or alcoholic if they are currently using because their behavior indicates that may be the case, they will often state “Oh I haven’t used in a long time!†If pushed to elaborate what constitutes a long time it may often be a day or two at most. To the addict that IS a long time. To those around him or her it is an extremely short amount of time and they are still holding their breath waiting for the other shoe to drop.
In early recovery each day may deem to drag on uncomfortably. Preoccupation with wanting to use drugs or alcohol fights against determination to be drug and alcohol free. On top of that, a whole new way of living is being learned a minute, an hour and a day at a time. As they look around them they might feel resentful for how easy others are just sailing through the day when for them it feels as though it will never end. They think to themselves “I have to try to do this the rest of my life?â€
When recovery is the goal it is important to gain acceptance of the truth that time takes time. There are only twenty four hours in any given day, 1440 minutes and 86,400 seconds. Just because the recovering alcoholic and addict would like it to be less and for their journey on the road to recovery to be further along does not change the physical aspect of time. It simply is what it is. That is why “One Day at a Time†is such an important slogan in twelve step recovery.
Almost every recovering addict and alcoholic is coming form a place of instant gratification. They are used to going with their impulses and the consequence be damned. Now a whole new way of living is attempted. The recovering person is learning to delay gratification and substitute worthwhile pursuits for the drink or drug of choice that has been the focus for so long. That takes practice and it takes TIME.
Having a plan for each day can keep someone new to recovery occupied throughout the crucial first weeks and months of recovery. That is why there are so many support meetings for alcohol and drug addiction. Other recovering addicts and alcoholics well remember the early days and how slowly they seemed to move at times. The hour or so they spend together may well be one less hour spent staring at the clock wondering if they are going to make it.
If it is tough to get out to many meetings and you have access to the computer there are even meetings on line. The phone is invaluable as no one understands this somewhat warped perspective of time better than another recovering person. Sharing the frustrations with how slow time may “seem†to be passing can be helpful. Gaining insight as to how others have survived it may be life-saving.
It is as important to remember that many people want the addict or alcoholic to succeed. They often have a truer sense of how much time has really passed. As the days and then weeks and then months pass by without the ensuing chaos brought about by the addict, these folks will begin to relax. The addict and alcoholic will begin to relax as well as they have put a significant amount of time between themselves and their last episode of using. Recovery from drug addiction and alcohol is not easy but it will help to keep a true perspective of the value of time.
Serving Alcohol At Parties
Have you decided to serve alcohol at your next party or gathering? It is a difficult decision to make these days. The party host can easily open him or herself up to liability by serving alcohol. This article will give you some options on serving alcohol and tips on cutting your risk and liability.
After you have decided to serve alcohol you must decide how you will serve it. One option is to have a full open bar. This is an expensive option. You will need a well stocked bar and a qualified bartender to run it. Both of these are not cheap but if money is no option, go with an open bar. Your guests will love you but be prepared to pay for taxis if some of your party goers get out of control.
Your next option is a cash bar. With this type of bar your guests will have to pay for all of their drinks. This is a good way to limit your liability because party goers are less likely to drink to excess if they have to pay for it.
The last option is a good compromise between the other two. You can have a limited bar. With a limited bar, you provide wine and beer for the guests free of charge. Select a couple types of beer and a couple types of wine. If they want a different type of beer, a different wine or a mixed drink, they pay for it.
Those are your main options for serving alcohol at a formal party. The most popular option by far would have to be the limited bar but the decision is up to you. In any case, be sure to have a qualified bartender on duty who can keep an eye on your guests and cut them off if necessary. And any time you serve alcohol be prepared to take keys from your guest and call a cab. Its just one of many duties you have as a party host.
Read This If You Need To Drink Alcohol in Order to Attract Women
Are you the type of guy who needs a couple of drinks in you before you feel confident enough to approach women?
What if I told you that there was a way to feel the confidence that you feel after a few drinks without having to drink, in fact you will be walking around with this confidence all the time. Just so you know I am not talking about the courage to simply approach ugly chicks either, which usually is the type of woman alcohol allows you to hook up with.
When you use alcohol to build up your confidence with women you might end up with a few numbers in your phone of women you may or may not recall or perhaps awake with a woman who you might remember being a whole lot more attractive last night.
Of course the problem with both of these scenarios is the person who you were the night before is in no way a representation of who you really think you are. So now you must decide if you want to go through the process of getting to know these women again or simply move on to another week.
Knowing what I know you are going to choose to move on because odds are she isn’t nearly as attractive as you thought she was.
Look I understand better than most why you do it.
Without the liquor in your system you are a quiet and reserved guy with a voice in your head telling you reason after reason why you shouldn’t approach someone. Most of the time it’s because she isn’t your type which might be the case, yet, when a woman comes along who is your type instead of that little voice in your head telling you to go for it the voice says “wait, this isn’t the right time” or “maybe she has a boyfriend”, then once the chance to approach her is over that little voice comes back and tells you what a loser you are.
Effects of alcohols on the phase transition temperatures of mixed-chain phosphatidylcholines
The biphasic effect of ethanol on the main phase transition temperature (Tm) of identical-chain phosphatidyl-cholines (PCs) in excess H2O is now well known. This biphasic effect can be attributed to the transformation of the lipid bilayer, induced by high concentrations of ethanol, from the partially interdigitated L beta, phase to the fully interdigitated L beta I phase at T < Tm. The basic packing unit of the L beta I phase has been identified recently as a binary mixture of PC/ethanol at the molar ratio of 1:2. The ethanol effect on mixed-chain PCs, however, is not known. We have thus in this study investigated the alcohol effects on the Tm of mixed-chain PCs with different delta C values, where delta C is the effective acyl chain length difference between the sn-1 and sn-2 acyl chains. Initially, molecular mechanics (MM) simulations are employed to calculate the steric energies associated with a homologous series of mixed-chain PCs packed in the partially and the fully interdigitated L beta I motifs. Based on the energetics, the preference of each mixed-chain PC for packing between these two different motifs can be estimated. Guided by MM results, high- resolution differential scanning calorimetry is subsequently employed to determine the Tm values for aqueous lipid dispersions prepared individually from a series of mixed-chain PCs (delta C = 0.5-6.5 C-C bond lengths) in the presence of various concentrations of ethanol. Results indicate that aqueous dispersions prepared from mixed-chain PCs with a delta C value of less than 4 exhibit a biphasic profile in the plot of Tm versus ethanol concentration. In contrast, highly asymmetric PCs (delta C > 4) do not exhibit such biphasic behavior. In the presence of a longer chain n-alcohol, however, aqueous dispersions of highly asymmetric C(12):C(20)PC (delta C = 6.5) do show such biphasic behavior against ethanol. Our results suggest that the delta C region in a highly asymmetric PC packed in the L beta I phase is most likely the binding site for n-alcohol.
WLS Patients Feeling Gassy & Bloated? Sugar Alcohol May Be To Blame
Sugar intake is a real concern for people who’ve had gastric bypass, in fact most patients fear sugar. The foremost fear isn’t weight gain, it’s dumping. Foods containing sugar pass too quickly through the small pouch, they are rapidly absorbed and cause insulin levels to drop resulting in dumping.
Very unpleasant. Instead of taking chances with sugar many of us reach for “sugar free†sweets or diabetic candy to satisfy our sweet tooth. Many of these products contain sugar alcohol, a natural sweetener derived from fruits and berries. Unlike artificial sweeteners that contain no calories, sugar alcohol has about half the calories of sugar. Diabetics are able to have food with sugar alcohol because it’s converted more slowly to glucose and require very little insulin to be metabolized.
While sugar alcohols are low in calories and slow to convert to glucose, the down side is they can cause gas, bloating and diarrhea. I learned this the hard way. One day that devil we call temptation seduced me into buying a bag of sugar-free jelly beans. Jelly beans are dangerous because they are little bites of soft food which means a gastric bypass patient can eat too much volume. I ate the entire bag in about an hour (true confessions of the closet snacker). I soon became uncomfortable with a small tummy ache. The tummy ache turned to bloating, cramping and gas. Extreme cases of all three symptoms. Painful “take me to the hospital I think I’m gonna explode†symptoms. It took a couple of days for my body to return to normal, a couple of stressful and uncomfortable days.
The jelly beans I ate contained Mannitol, a common sugar alcohol extracted from seaweed. I know they contained Mannitol because I read the package mid-way through the crisis. The package contained this warning, “Warning: excessive consumption can cause a laxative effect†Fine time to be reading labels I told myself! Mannitol is found naturally in pineapples, olives, asparagus, sweet potatoes and carrots. It’s about 60% as sweet as sugar, so more product is needed to replicate the sweetness of sugar. “Mannitol lingers in the intestines for a long time and therefore causes bloating and diarrhea.†Yup! That’s exactly what happens all right.
What other names are sugar alcohols called?
Sorbitol is found naturally in fruits and vegetables. It is manufactured from corn syrup. Sorbitol has only 50 percent of the relative sweetness of sugar which means twice as much must be used to deliver a similar amount of sweetness to a product. It has less of a tendency to cause diarrhea compared to mannitol. It is often an ingredient in sugar-free gums and candies.
Xylitol is also called “wood sugar†and occurs naturally in straw, corncobs, fruit, vegetables, cereals, mushrooms and some cereals. Xylitol has the same relative sweetness as sugar. It is found in chewing gums.
Lactitol has about 30-40 percent of sugar’s sweetening power, but its taste and solubility profile resembles sugar so it is often found in sugar-free ice cream, chocolate, hard and soft candies, baked goods, sugar-reduced preserves and chewing gums.
Isomalt is 45 - 65 percent as sweet as sugar and does not tend to lose its sweetness or break down during the heating process. Isomalt absorbs little water, so it is often used in hard candies, toffee, cough drops and lollipops.
Maltitol is 75 percent as sweet as sugar. It is used in sugar-free hard candies, chewing gum, chocolate-flavored desserts, baked goods and ice cream because it gives a creamy texture to foods.
Hydrogenated starch hydrolysates (HSH) are produced by the partial hydrolysis of corn. HSH are nutritive sweeteners that provide 40 - 90 percent of the sweetness of sugar. HSH do not crystallize and are used extensively in confections, baked goods and mouthwashes.
Should Gastric Bypass Patients indulge their sweet tooth with sugar alcohol?
The American Diabetes Association claims that sugar alcohols are acceptable in a moderate amount but should not be eaten in excess. In addition, weight gain has been seen when these products are overeaten. Personally, I’m not dipping my sticky fingers into sugar-free candy again. For gastric bypass patients generally the key, as in all eating, must be moderation, not a full bag of jelly beans. And of course, we can always rely on the old advice of conventional dieters, “Hungry for something sweet? Reach for a piece of fruit.â€
Can I Eat Sugar Alcohols On My Low Carb Diet
“Polyols” or sugar alcohols are a number of different carbohydrates that are neither sugars nor alcohols–and are commonly used as artificial sweeteners in a range of products, from ice cream to chewing gum.
While these tasty sweeteners appear to be the perfect solution for both low-carb dieters and low-carb food producers, recent studies of sugar alcohols have painted a somewhat different picture.
To begin with, sugar alcohols are not entirely carb-free. Most studies have indicated that sugar alcohols contain approximately 1/2 to 1/3 the amount of calories as sugar–and in the form of carbohydrates.
In addition, studies have shown that sugar alcohols are absorbed by the small intestine, but the process is slower and fractured. This affects a rise in blood sugar, but again is smaller and more gradual than with sugar–and the rise tends to vary from person to person.
Sugar alcohols also have a laxative effect on some consumers. Since they are only partially absorbed, they bring water into the bowel–and undigested carbs into the colon, creating gas and bloating as the carbs are acted on by bacteria.
Over-consumption of sugar alcohols can often have an adverse effect on low carb dieters, even when they can digest them properly. Sugar alcohols can trigger cravings in low carb dieters, causing them to deviate from dietary restrictions.
In addition, sugar alcohols can often cause low carb dieters to choose an unhealthy diet of sweets, which appear to be carb-free, over a varied diet that includes essential nutrients.
If you are currently on a low carb diet and want to mix sugar alcohol products into your diet, it is very important that you monitor your total sugar alcohol intake–and keep it at a minimum while consuming a healthy diet.
One easy way to do this is to determine the total amount of carbs in sugar alcohol products you are consuming. You can do this by subtracting the amount of fat and protein calories per serving from the total amount of calories per serving. Simply multiply the grams of protein by four and the grams of fat by nine. Now subtract the sum of the two from the total amount of calories per serving.
Using these figures, you can determine whether or not carbs are being “hidden” in “carb free” sugar alcohol products you consume, allowing you to make a better-informed decision that fits the prescriptions of your low-carb diet.