Do you love whiskey so much that you end up asking, “Can whiskey make you fat?” Does your mind wander about whiskey calories? We have the perfect article to answer this question once and for all
Like any other type of alcohol, whiskey has a high calorie count, and it will definitely contribute to weight gain, especially when consumed in excess or when you don’t burn all those extra calories!
Keep reading this article to learn more about whiskey and weight gain, and to understand how whiskey can make you fat.
Sipping this article:
Can Whiskey Make You Fat?
Answering this question should be less complex than it actually is. First, we need to take a close look at how people gain weight. In short, people gain weight because their bodies are not using as many calories as they are consuming. This may happen for several reasons that range from genetics and health issues to lifestyle and dietary choices.
If a person is trying to gain weight, independently of the reason for that, they must create a caloric surplus: eating more kilocalories (kcal) than they burn throughout the day. That is: eating energy-dense foods more frequently, and in bigger portions.
If they want to lose weight, they must do the opposite. Cut on sugars and highly caloric foods or drinks, eat in smaller portions and practice physical activity to burn more calories than they intake during their day.
Focusing on whiskey, since it is an alcoholic beverage, you can expect that it has a high caloric count. But can whiskey make you fat? It all depends on your daily caloric intake and whether you burn extra calories or not.
Struggling with the whiskey calories topic? Here’s an article that might help!
How Does Whiskey Cause Weight Gain?
When eating any type of food, the human body breaks it down into the different units of calories needed. It means that your body extracts the proteins, carbs, and fats required to support various bodily functions. However, the body responds to alcohol differently.
Many of the alcohol derivatives are toxic to the human body, meaning that their survival mechanism will not recognize them as a source of digestible fuel. That’s why our natural survival mechanism tries to get rid of these toxins as quickly as possible, sending them to the liver for processing.
Because alcohol is toxic, the body prioritizes alcohol metabolism and elimination of its derivatives. While this is happening, the sugar, salt, carbohydrates, oils and other nutrients present in foods and beverages ingested before or during alcohol consumption will remain untouched. Those will be stored as fats.
In the end, depending on how much alcohol you have consumed, the body may take hours to eliminate all its toxic derivatives, and all the other stored nutrients may or may not be metabolized.
4 Other Reasons Why Whiskey Can Make You Fat
While food provides calories with nutritional benefit and the body can actually burn them during its daily functions, whiskey calories have no nutritional value. And that means that you will have to burn them off if you don’t want to gain weight.
However, that is not the only reason why whiskey can make you fat.
1. Alcohol is energy-dense
When compared with proteins or carbohydrates, alcohol has a higher calorie count. If the first two nutrients provide around 4kcal per gram, alcohol provides 7kcal. Compared to fat, alcohol is slightly above, as fat provides 9 kcal per gram.
This means that alcoholic drinks contribute a high number of calories to your daily intake, even if they are “empty” calories.
2. Alcohol compromises fat burning
Not only does alcohol add extra calories to a daily intake, but it also reduces the human body’s ability to metabolize fat or other nutrients. As the body sees alcohol as a toxin, it focuses on those calories to eliminate them and slows down or completely stops burning fat.
This process can take up to 36 hours, and that is how people accumulate abdominal fat.
3. Alcohol can increase cortisol levels and fat storage
By disrupting hormones related to metabolism and activating the body’s central stress response, alcohol makes your cortisol levels increase.
Since alcohol acts as a stressor for the human body, our brain releases cortisol, the stress hormone. As the cortisol levels get higher, fat storage also increases, especially in the abdominal area.
The Elsevier Journal published a paper about the “Associations between Alcohol Consumption and Body Fat Distribution in Type 1 Diabetes“, and it claims that elevated cortisol increases the proliferation of fat cells and leads to the storage of visceral fat around abdominal organs, contributes to insulin resistance, and creates a metabolic disturbance associated with abdominal obesity.
4. Whiskey may increase appetite and cravings
Not only whiskey, but all alcoholic drinks increase your appetite and cravings for unhealthy or fat saturated foods.
Whiskey (and alcohol, in general) activates nerve cells in the hypothalamus, which is usually triggered by starvation. Since the brain is tricked and perceives it as a need for extra calories, people start feeling hungry, thirsty and crave highly caloric foods.
On the other hand, alcohol reduces inhibition and self-control, so it becomes difficult to regulate the quantity and the kind of food a person will eat.
If this is not enough, whiskey can make you fat because it disrupts hormones such as leptin, the ones which regulate fullness, encouraging the person to eat more than usual.
5. Adding a mixer increases the whiskey’s calorie count
Mixers cannot be left out when answering the question “Can whiskey make you fat?”.
If a standard shot (45ml or 1.5oz) of whiskey has around 97 calories, with a sugary mixer such as cola, soda, or another type of alcohol may enhance the calorie count up to 250kcal.
It will always depend on the quantity and type of mixer, but it is certain that, unless it is plain water or a zero-calorie mixer, it will contribute much more to the daily calorie intake than the whiskey.
Can Whiskey Make You Fat? Yes, but here’s the solution for Whiskey Enthusiasts
If you limit your weekly whiskey consumption, avoid foods and beverages that have a high calorie count, eat light and nutritious foods, and practice physical activity daily, you might not get fat.
Another tip for whiskey enthusiasts is to resist the food cravings, since it is a false alarm from your brain. If you do have to eat, choose a low-calorie snack and drink a lot of water.
So, can whiskey make you fat?
Yes and no. If you have a regimented plan of drinking whiskey and compensate for your calorie intake with physical activity, ensuring that you will burn the calories that are stored in your body, whiskey may not make you gain weight.