When alcohol is oxidized it is changed to water energy and what?
Empty calories. The calories in alcohol have no nutritional
value, but the body will burn them for fuel over calories obtained
from food. The proverbial beer gut is not made of beer, but of fat.
It forms when someone is ingesting large amounts of alcohol while
eating a regular diet. The body burns the simple alcoholic calories
because these calories cannot be changed to other forms such as fat
and stored in the body. Food, however, can be changed to fat and
stored for later use.
The problem is that, by taking in such large amounts of alcohol,
with the body storing the food and nutrients as fat, the person is
nutritionally deprived even though they may think they are eating
well. The beer gut is not beer, it is food with all the vitamins
and nutrients that food contains, stored as a large, fat belly.
Sam Snodgrass, PhD
carbon dioxide