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Hunger may play a role in alcohol addiction, new study finds (www.brown.edu)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] 4 points 1 week ago (5 children)

That makes sense for beer and wine since theres usually still unconverted sugars in those but the body cant really get energy from ethanol, so it makes significantly less sense for addictions to hard liquors.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (4 children)

    Ethanol metabolism does feed into the Krebs cycle and results in about 7 calories per gram. It just passes through some pretty nasty intermediate steps, with acetaldehyde circulating and causing tissue damage in the meantime.

    But you can get usable energy out of ethanol.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago (3 children)

    I'm not sure how much I trust the cited experiment from 1902 you seem to be referring to. And more recent research seems to imply that alcohol has some suppressive effects on the mitochondria, which would interfere with the Krebs cycle.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago (2 children)

    Alcohol definitely interferes with all sorts of stuff, I'm not disputing that. The body prioritizes getting rid of circulating alcohol.

    But if you look at the way the body metabolizes alcohol, using alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) enzymes to convert to acetaldehyde, and aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) enzymes to convert to acetate, the process accumulates acetate in the body. And acetate is metabolized in the Krebs cycle.

    I don't know what experiment you're referring to, but the metabolic pathway that ethanol follows, to acetate, is pretty well established. And that pathway accounts for how the body gets rid of something like 98% of the alcohol it consumes.

    As the body gets rid of that poison, it consumes oxygen and releases carbon dioxide, generating energy stored in ATP molecules.

    Alcohol has calories. This is basic textbook nutritional science.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    The 7 calories per gram comes from the Atwater paper published in 1902 and is citation #15 under the references of the Wikipedia page.

    I get that alcohol has calories in the sense if you put it in a bomb calorimeter it'll output 7 calories per gram of ethanol. You can put a gram of uranium 237 in a bomb calorimeter and measure 20 billion calories, that does not automatically mean the body has the ability to use those as sources of energy for cellular respiration, which last I checked only functions on glucose. Also the wiki page also states that 90% of the metabolism happens in the liver, which again, is not where cellular respiration across the rest of the body is happening.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    We're not unicellular organisms, though.

    Also the wiki page also states that 90% of the metabolism happens in the liver

    That's true of quite a few macronutrients we eat.

    Fructose needs to be metabolized in the liver, which converts some of it into glucose or lactate, which then circulates to cells that will use either in respiration. It also gets converted to glycogen stored in the liver, which can then be used to converted into glucose as needed for regulating blood glucose.

    Lipid metabolism, which also relies on the liver, has fatty acids assembled into triglycerides, and circulated to where cells can take them in as free fatty acids and glycerol, for cellular respiration through beta oxidation.

    Starches and other complex carbohydrates are split up by enzymes in saliva or fermented in the gut, often by microbes, releasing glucose that can enter the bloodstream.

    Alcohol metabolism results in acetate both in the liver and circulating in the body. The acetate is metabolized into acetyl-CoA, which is used for synthesizing fatty acids (which can be used for cellular respiration or converted to triglycerides for longer term storage). Acetate can also directly support cellular respiration in the brain, as an alternative to glucose, and chronic alcoholics often have brain tissue that has adapted to use more acetate than glucose.

    The point, though, is that all the different metabolic pathways result in oxygen being consumed and carbon dioxide being produced. The limited abilities of specific cells to make use of certain compounds doesn't change the fact that the entire body has organs that help process what we eat into what our cells can use.

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