Diabetes And Alcohol –What You NEED To Know

If there’s one thing that I feel every diabetic needs to be more aware of, it’s the beverages they are putting into their mouths.

The thing with liquid calories is that we don’t register them. We drink them back and then go about our day. Nothing else changes. So if those beverages contained calories, we’ve now just added those to our normal dietary intake.

If your normal dietary intake is enough to control your body weight, guess what? You’re now gaining weight. It’s bad news for anyone stuck in this trap. Now if you add alcohol to the picture, things change slightly.

I often get asked by people how bad alcohol really is. Is it really necessary for them to give up their nightly drink or two if they really enjoy it?

My simple answer is: it’s bad. Let me explain why.

1. Calorie Content.

As we just noted above, liquid calories are a fast way to gain weight because you aren’t accounting for them.

Now you might say, ‘But wait! I’ll be sure to add them to my total daily calorie intake. If I do that, can I now have them?’

To that, I say, ‘Be careful.’ If you are adding those calories to your day that means you are removing calories from another part of your day. This means you could be missing out on nutrition that was otherwise important to you.

See the problem here? Swapping out good, healthy calories for alcohol calories is a recipe for disaster as far as your health is concerned. Alcohol provides no nutrition whatsoever. In fact, it’s a toxin for the body.

2. Impact On Blood Sugar

The next reason you need to be especially careful about your alcohol intake is that it does impact your blood glucose level. While you may not get that high of a response from something like rum or vodka, if you drink a sweetened liquor, you can rest assured this is having some impact on your blood glucose levels.

What’s more is that very often you are drinking the alcohol in the form of a mixed drink, meaning a high-sugar, high-calorie mixer was added during the preparation process.

These drinks can be extremely detrimental as they can be upwards of 400+ calories per serving.

3. Fat Burning Processes

Finally, the last reason why having alcohol in your diet is all around a bad idea is that it will immediately put the breaks on all fat-burning processes taking place in your system.

Essentially, your body could be burning up fat very well, but when alcohol comes into the picture, it now takes the priority. Alcohol is a toxin, so as you can imagine, your body’s top goal is to remove that toxin before it does more damaging effects.

It’s only when the alcohol is completely oxidized off that you can begin to get back to your normal rate of fat burning once again.

So for all of these reasons, I strongly encourage you to do away with alcohol altogether. I know this may be hard for some of you. You really enjoy your bottle of wine or beer at the end of a long, hard day, but if you are keen on maximizing the control you have over your blood sugar levels, it’s something that you are definitely going to want to do.