[b said:
Quote[/b] (ejones @ Jan. 12 2004,11:56)]i was wondering how a gram of alcohol would go about being converted into something stored in the body. is an alcohol calorie basically just passed through the body w/out being stored or is there actually a process that can store it as fat, protein, or glycogen? should alcohol calories be counted in total daily caloric intake?
I'm going to respond first to the question in your title: "is an alcohol calorie the same as others?"
The answer is: maybe.
There's some serious voodoo that happens with alcohol. Measured in a bomb calorimeter, alcohol has 7ish kcal/g, but actual in vivo alcohol metabolism seems to be fairly individual, and also seems to be dependent upon alcohol consumption patterns (alcoholics seem to metabolize fewer calories from alcohol than non-alcoholics do) as well as gender (women seem to metabolize fewer calories from alcohol than men do). Basically, it's all pretty funky. I dug up some studies a while back, I'll see if I can find them again.
Okay, here's one:
Perspectives: do alcohol calories count?
CS Lieber
Section of Liver Diseases, Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center, NY 10468.
Chronic consumption of substantial amounts of alcohol is not associated with the expected effect on body weight. Isocaloric substitution of carbohydrates by ethanol results in weight loss, and addition of ethanol to an otherwise normal diet does not produce the expected weight gain. This energy deficit cannot be explained by maldigestion or malabsorption but has been attributed to induction of the microsomal ethanol oxidizing system (a metabolic pathway that oxidizes ethanol without associated chemical energy production), increased sympathetic tone and associated thermogenesis, and/or enhanced ATP breakdown (with increased purine catabolism) secondary to the acetate produced from ethanol. All these hypotheses do not fully explain the lack of weight deficit when alcohol is consumed with a very-low-fat diet, which suggests that an alteration in the energy utilization derived from fat plays a major role, possibly through uncoupling of oxidation with phosphorylation in mitochondria damaged by chronic ethanol consumption
As far as how to count alcohol calories, yeah, count them all. Also be aware that alcohol has a detrimental effect on lipid metabolism, so it's probably a good idea to avoid it as much as possible when you're cutting.
