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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

My only beef with drinking is it makes you so fat so fast! I wish I knew it was worse than eating bars of butter and buckets of cooking oil.

It doesn't solve problems but stops the pain. Frees you temporarily from thinking and deciding things under the influence of pain.

I don't get modern medicine. Grief, loss, loneliness (long term), stress and more mental/emotional ailments are found to be detrimental to human health, even causing most non-cancer chronic diseases. I would really like to see a study that somehow shows people surviving long term who were about so self-medicate with tobacco or alcohol, instead of survival rate that only takes into account the substance's harm.

Alcohol and cigarettes harmed me but they also helped me survive. It's not a black and white clear cut thing.

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> makes you so fat so fast

I would consider myself a high functioning heavy drinker (but not an alcoholic). I'm also physically fit without weight issues, so I think this is probably more a personal statement.

Ethanol is metabolised in the primarily liver into acetaldehyde which slowly damages the liver, if you drink enough to process more your live can handle it will damage the live. It also leads to fatty liver disease which cause metabolic problems. Being fit and a healthy weight doesn't make much difference.

It's the same reason why a diet high in sugar cause the same problems; as sugar is 50% fructose which is metabolised by the live in the same way as ethanol.

A pint of Heineken (very popular lager in the UK) is 225 calories. For a small person, 6 pints might be the equivalent of their daily food intake. Anecdotally speaking, drinking doesn' fill me, and I end up either snacking on nuts (which are also super high calorie), eating chips, or just eating a meal anyway.

Of course you can drink heavily and not have weight problems, in the same way you can eat cake and frozen pizza exclusively and not have weight problems, but you would be lying to say they don't make you fat reeeeeal quick.

No I wouldn't. My DCI is around 3k due to me running around 9 - 11km every day. Which would mean 4 pints every day would only be a 3rd (not even) - and I eat a balanced / high protein diet. I'm not saying I drink 4 pints every day - but I am saying it's personal.

How does alcohol make you fat? I don't think I've met a fat alcoholic. Must be something else

Beer alcoholics can be fat, hard liquor not gonna happen.

whiskey has 70 calories in an ounce, you can absolutely get fat from hard liquor, the only liquor that wont get you fat is the disgusting kind

They’re probably not an alcoholic. Hard liquor alcoholics throw up, have diarrhea, and struggle to eat.

Chances of getting fat increase if you’re drinking 15-20 beers a day.

real alcoholics don't throw up. they do struggle to eat. in fact its pretty usual to to forget, or just not.

when I quit drinking I was _appalled_ at how much I had to eat. probably twice what I had been. and I lost quite a bit of weight.

Can your body fully process those calories? I know nuts are calorie dense but you don’t get the full caloric value.

I didn't even consider beer alcoholism. It would still have to be just bad eating habits, though. I know skinny people who drink several litters beer a day and the fatsos whole like this stuff have always been somewhat big. It's not the alcohol, no

Depends on how many calories you burn.

If calorie intake is 1 and calorie burn is also 1, you have 0 surplus calories. Let's say you have 1 extra calorie (keeping it simple) , the source is important. Alcohol > sugar > oil > bread/carb foods > veggies/fiber,etc... in terms of how much of that 1 cal your body can extract and convert to fat for long term storage.

I wish there was diet alcohol lol.

Each beer is like 300 to 400 calories. And then you eat bar food when you're drunk which is not known as the worlds healthiest.

Having shit food afterwards is alcohol's fault? Sounds like fat people blaming anything but themselves.

Yeah seriously people should eat more of the celery and salad options at bars when they're smashed out of their mind.

What on god's-green-earth kind of beers are these? A pint is usually between 200/250 - strong beer (10%) usually hit's in the 350 range - but are you really saying that's normal at a bar?

https://www.menshealth.com/uk/weight-loss/a744496/drink-beer...

Took me a few days to realize why the huge salty pretzels were "free" at the German bar.

Alcohol temporarily halts sugar metabolism as the body views it as a digestible poison and grants alcohol digestive priority. Sugars not metabolized by the liver must either be pissed out or stored as fat, but passing excess sugars to the kidneys takes time all the while the priority for the kidneys is passing alcohol not metabolized by the liver using as much stored water as it takes.

The same way pizza and bread make you fat. I tried anything from wine to vodka, if I drink enough to get drunk, unless I compensate with a really good food diet and a ton of workout, I will gain weight. What makes you gain weight is not just the raw calories but relative to food, it is very efficient in delivering most of those calories to your blood.

"Don't drink your calories"

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