Alcohol on a Low-Carb Diet: What You Need to Know

Quick Summary: A guide to drinking alcohol while eating low-carb. Covers how alcohol affects your body differently on this diet, which drinks have the fewest carbs, and strategies for socializing without derailing your progress.

Jump to: How Alcohol Acts with Slow Carb | Distilled Spirits | Beer | Wine | Which Drinks Have Least Carbs? | FAQ

Alcohol can fit into a low-carb lifestyle, but it helps to understand how it works in your body when you’re eating this way.

The short version: you’ll likely feel alcohol faster on a low-carb diet, and while many spirits have zero carbs, the calories still count if weight loss is your goal. Wine is mostly fine depending on amount. Beer is tricky. Sugary mixers are the real problem.

Here’s what you need to know to make informed choices.

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How Alcohol Acts Differently on Slow-Carb

Although alcohol is often lumped into the carbohydrate category, it acts differently than other carbs in the body. For one thing, when there is alcohol in the body, its calories are used first for energy, before carbohydrate or fat.

These calories are sometimes referred to as “empty”, and even a single serving of clear spirits will have around 100 of them. If you’re on a slow carb diet for weight loss reasons, remember that although some drinks have zero carbs, they can still affect your results due to calories.

It can also have some unpredictable effects on blood sugar. This is because when alcohol is present, the liver goes to work on it immediately, breaking it down into carbon dioxide and water. The liver’s job is to get rid of toxins in the body, and alcohol is like a poison in that way.

While the liver is working on breaking down the alcohol, it isn’t doing its other jobs as well, including regulating the amount of glucose in the blood. So blood glucose can, in fact, drop a bit.

To minimize this, don’t drink on an empty stomach, and limit alcohol on a low carb diet to two drinks per day for a man, or one drink for a woman. (A drink is 12-ounce beer, 4-ounce wine, or 2 ounces of distilled alcohol.)

The late physician Alex Paton, who was a gastroenterologist and expert on alcohol misuse, stated:

Food, and particularly carbohydrate, retards absorption: blood concentrations may not reach a quarter of those achieved on an empty stomach.

–Alex Paton

It’s not surprising, then, that you need to take it easy if you’re on a slow carb diet!

Remember that you may also hit the legal driving limit quicker, so it’s best to leave the car at home even if you’re only having one or two drinks tonight.

Carbs in Non-flavored Distilled Spirits

Unflavored spirits like whiskey, vodka, brandy and gin don’t have any carbs. As long as you don’t combine them with any sugary mixers, you can rest assured that your drink is carb-free.

If you do want a mixed drink, there are some ways to keep it really light on the carbohydrates. This can be difficult if you’re ordering at a bar, but if you’re mixing up some cocktails at home, you’ve got options.

First off, I particularly like using drink syrups instead of sugar-laden sodas, as they’re not nearly as heavy on the carbs and you can more easily monitor how much sugar you’re putting in your drink.

Other easy carb-cutting options include using carb-free sweeteners rather than sugar or a little simple syrup with diet soda as a mixer.

Check out a few of my favorites:

• Here are some great craft cocktails compliant with a low carb diet.
• Skinny Moscow Mules
• Blackberry Mojitos

Carbs in Beer

There is some confusion about maltose in beer because of things written in some low-carb diet books. Although the malted barley used to make beer produces maltose, a sugar that has a glycemic index higher than glucose, the fermentation process uses up all the maltose in the beer while it is being brewed.

The USDA database shows that there is no maltose in beer. However, there is carbohydrate in beer that should be counted as you would count any other carb.

The amount varies depending upon the brand of beer. Regular beer averages about 12 grams of carbohydrate per 12 oz can or serving. Sorry beer drinkers!

Light beer isn’t necessarily low-carb beer either, nor is alcohol-free beer. Some light beer has almost as much carbohydrate as regular beer. Most, though, is in the range of 3 to 7 grams of carbohydrate per serving. It’s best to just read each label when deciding.

Ale generally has somewhat less carbohydrate than regular beer (5-9 grams per serving), whereas stout is the worst kind of beer you can drink on a low-carb diet. It has around 20 grams of carb per 12-oz serving.

Carbs in Wine

Basically a 3.5 oz glass of wine, red or white, has around 91 g of water, 9.6 g of alcohol, 73 calories and 1.2 g of “carbohydrates by difference”.

There aren’t actually ANY carbohydrates in wine, but that ‘leftover’ amount is the glycerine in the wine that sort of acts like a carbohydrate. It just doesn’t raise the blood sugar.

Wines have very few carbs in them at all, or at least the dry ones don’t, and the calories in wine come from the alcohol. The end result is that the wine which is higher in alcohol is the one that will be higher in “carb equivalents”.

So you could say that a wine with 14% alcohol gives you 2 carbs and a wine of maybe 10% gives you 1 carb. The net result is that a glass of wine gives you “under 2g of “carb-like substances”.

The Atkins diet has reversed their recommendations on no wine, and it might not be long before they fully endorse wine drinking as a non-carb-counting activity, because of how it raises your HDL and lowers your blood sugar levels.

Tim Ferriss allows a glass of dry red wine per day on the 4-Hour Body Diet (aka slow carb).

Best Slow-Carb Drink Choices

Zero or near-zero carb:

• Whiskey, vodka, gin, tequila, rum (unflavored)
• Dry martini
• Vodka or gin with soda and lime
• Dry red or white wine

Moderate carbs:

• Light beer (3-7g)
• Ale (5-9g)

Avoid:

• Regular beer (12g+)
• Stout (20g)
• Sweet cocktails with juice or soda
• Flavored spirits (often have added sugar)
• Sweet wines, port, dessert wines

FAQ

Paton, A. (2005). Alcohol in the body. Bmj, 330(7482), 85-87.

Interested in the Slow Carb Diet? Check out this comprehensive E-Guide on Fat Loss through a Slow Carb Diet.