Alcohol and Weight Gain

Alcohol and Weight Gain

Alcohol is a special case. Alcohol is metabolized mostly in the liver. Some 80 % of the calories from a shot of vodka, for instance, will go straight to the liver to be converted into a small amount of energy and a large amount of a molecule called "citrate". The citrate then fuels the process that makes fatty acids  out of our glucose we ingest. So alcohol will increase the production of fat in the liver , which probably explains alcoholic fatty liver syndrome. It might also make us fatter elsewhere, although whether we store these fats as fat or burn them might depend on whether we eat or drink carbohydrates with the alcohol, which we usually do. Roughly a third of the calories in a typical beer, for instance, come originally from maltose - a refined carbohydrate - compared with the two-thjirds from the alcohol itself.
A beer belly is the conspicuous result.

From Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes  pages 138-139