New research suggests that drinking alcohol may widen your waistline – and your derriere – more than you think. Rachael Combe investigates how liquor can make you thicker.
So I was driving my car, listening to a national news station, shaking my head at the radio reports on global warming and the economy, when suddenly I was assaulted with the worst news ever: “Having a mere 90 millilitres of alcohol reduces fat-burning by about a third.” A diet-book author was being interviewed and her words hit me like a sodden bar mat.
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 Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins were splitting up: how could you opt for one or the other when they’re both much better as a couple? The author continued: “If you’re trying to lose weight, you probably need to stop drinking alcohol altogether. You booze, you don’t lose.”
It’s not like I thought cabernet was made with Splenda. I knew it was rich in kilojoules, 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 this particular radio program tells me, but
I decided to do a little fact-checking. After all, I had a lot to lose – a few beers at the pub is a national pastime.
Since the majority of Australians need to shed a few kilos (at last count, 68 per cent of men and 55 per cent of women were overweight or obese), and with health officials constantly 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), wouldn’t we have heard the news by now that a sixpack of lager were some evil fat-storing demon foodstuff? And beyond that, moderate drinking has been linked with a lower risk for heart disease and diabetes and increased levels of “good” high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol. How could it do that and be working overtime to make you fat? But the author is right: alcohol can indeed affect your figure depending on genetics, diet and gender.
When you drink alcohol, it’s broken down by the liver into acetate, which the body will burn for energy before it uses any other form of kilojoule, including those from fat or sugar. So if you relax with several glasses of shiraz along with a few rows of chocolate, you’re more likely to store the kilojoules from the fat and sugar in the chocolate, because your body would be getting all its energy from the acetate in the booze you sucked down. Further, studies show that alcohol temporarily inhibits lipid oxidation, which means it’s harder for your body to burn the fat that’s already there when alcohol is present in your system.
Making matters worse, people tend to eat more when they drink alcohol during a meal, possibly because the booze interferes with satiety or simply because it makes their judgement fuzzier about whether or not they should have
that fourth slice of pizza. And frankly, alcohol is not a diet food: a 30ml shot of vodka has around 266kJ, a 120ml glass of white wine carries 315kJ, while a schooner of light beer packs a whopping 464kJ.
On the other hand, research shows that alcohol consumption doesn’t seem to correlate with excess weight among women. Numerous studies have found that females who are light drinkers tend to have a more stable and lower body mass index (BMI) over time than their heavy-drinking counterparts (the same does not appear to be true for men, who seem to steadily gain weight with increasing alcohol consumption). You have to take this data with a grain of salt, however; it could be that women who drink moderately have other healthy habits that keep their weight in check. Or it could be that drinking alcohol keeps other appetites at bay.
Harvard researchers report that women who had two to four drinks a day had lower BMIs and ate fewer carbohydrates (particularly in the form of junk food) than those on either end of the drinking spectrum.
Scientists have long observed that not all alcoholics seem as portly as one might expect, given the staggering number of kilojoules they consume via alcohol. Metabolic studies of chronic drinkers have found that so much damage is done to the liver that it stops processing alcohol efficiently and the kilojoules are stored on the organ itself, causing fatty liver disease, which can lead to cirrhosis and death. And indeed some of the symptoms of cirrhosis include poor appetite and weight loss.
“It’s similar to the way you make foie gras,” says Marc Hellerstein, professor of human nutrition at the University of California. “If you stuff a goose with carbohydrates, its liver stores it as glycogen and fat. When the goose is killed, it’s full of fat and sugar, so it tastes really great – that’s foie gras.” And you can bet that is your average alcoholic’s liver!
Still, even if abusive drinkers don’t stack on the extra kilos, it doesn’t exactly add up to a knockout figure. Habitual excessive alcohol consumption has long been linked to an increased waist-to-hip ratio (or beer belly). And recent research shows that even infrequent binge drinking can thicken your midsection. A study of more than 28,000 middle-aged people in Eastern Europe found that women who drank about four drinks on one occasion, at least once a month, had larger waists than did moderate drinkers. (For men,
it was seven drinks.)
So what’s a girl to think if she wants to have her wine and her waist, too? You have to consider your genetic risk for heart disease and cancer (even moderate drinking has been shown to increase the risk for breast cancer, for example), whether you’re willing to make the necessary kilojoule cuts in your diet to make room for alcohol and if you’re truly able to drink moderately.
As for me? Well I’ve always gone with my heart (and the health of my heart), so I’m sticking with a glass or two of good quality wine on occasion.
Staff story: my six-week booze ban
At first it was easy to give up my mid-week wines, but come Friday evening I really craved a glass or two. I missed the wave of relaxation from a drink. To cope, I spent weekends at home, watching DVDs, and going to bed early. While it was good for my wallet, it did little for my sanity, so I ventured out again and found it hard to resist the urgings of my friends and family to “have just one”. Then five weeks in, something changed – I loved waking up fresh, energetic and, yes, slightly smug. Although the want of alcohol never subsided completely, I now know I can cut my intake and will apply a self-imposed ban now and then. So was it a case of glass or arse? Let’s just say with the money I saved, I’m investing in a new pair of jeans. – Angela Honeywell
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