How enjoying a boozy bevie can lead to food cravings and what we can do about it.
TL;DR: Alcohol messes with our liver’s ability to keep steady blood glucose levels. This tricks our brains into thinking we need to eat more food to avoid low blood sugar. (about 6.5 min read)
Metabolic tips for avoiding over-eating when (responsibly!) enjoying adult drinks:
Stay hydrated! This helps your liver do its job better and faster.
Choose alcohol + food combinations that won’t create a “sugar crash”.
Dance (aka move around) to increase circulation so your brain, liver, and pancreas can communicate faster through signals in the bloodstream!
Bad pizza places are always open late because nobody goes there for pizza. We go there for the post-bar snacks. (RIP Hi Fi Pizza, you were good to us/your pizza was very bad.) Greasy spoon diners, really inauthentic Chinese take-out, any place serving bare-minimum nachos* isn’t really selling us food. They are selling us a fix to our late night food cravings. That’s why the food doesn’t have to be good; it isn’t actually the product. The real product is being open during the off-hours.
Why is it so common to be hungry after drinking? Alcohol messes with our liver and brain’s ability to properly control our blood glucose levels (BGLs) and this leads to a “sugar crash” (hypoglycemia) that tricks our brains into thinking we need to eat more. Normally, our livers will sense when BGLs are getting low and they will put more glucose into the blood stream. The liver does this by making new glucose from other molecules (gluconeogenesis) and from breaking down glycogen into individual glucose molecules (glycogenolysis). Your liver then releases this glucose into the blood stream so that your BGLs don’t fall too far.
How alcoholic beverages affect your blood glucose depends on the type of beverage, your hydration state, and when you last ate. It’s been known since the mid-70s that alcohol increases insulin secretion in response to food (some of the early studies gave people a 2oz whiskey pour an hour after lunch; the scientific method really does come down to “fuck around and find out”…). This means that drinking before eating will result in more insulin being in the blood before glucose from food hits the bloodstream. This is sometimes interpreted as “good” for blood glucose control, but that is a superficial interpretation. Anything that makes it harder for your liver to maintain proper BGLs is not good for blood glucose control.
Insulin is still a growth factor, and having more insulin around = storing more food as fat or glycogen. The later it is in the day, the more of that food is going to get stored as fat since your fat cells become more sensitive to insulin later in the day (ie, less insulin is required to get your fat cells to take glucose out of the bloodstream, so the fat cells can take it out more quickly. This is in contrast to earlier in the day when you’re muscles do more work to take glucose out of your bloodstream and less goes to your fat cells.)
Beer and sweet cocktails cause “sugar spikes” followed by “sugar crashes”. All alcoholic beverages are going to cause someone’s body to release extra insulin. Extra insulin in the blood = sugars get taken out of the bloodstream really quickly, leading to a “sugar crash”. In addition, some alcoholic beverages like beer and sweet cocktails contain simple carbohydrates (aka sugar) themselves and are going to contribute to a larger sugar spike, a release of even more insulin, and a harder sugar crash.
Staying hydrated is a really important tool in fighting this sugar crash. While the absorption of simple sugars into our bloodstream can be slowed down by eating foods with fiber, the absorption of alcohol cannot be slowed down. Ethanol (the specific alcohol that we drink) can pass through our cell’s membranes. So it’s immediately hitting our blood as soon as it hits our mouth, stomach, and intestines.
Choosing low-sugar beverages and snacks can also help reduce the sugar spike and dampen the sugar crash. There is no getting around the extra insulin that is coming from drinking alcohol, so a sugar crash is very hard to avoid unless we make a conscious effort to drink alcohol slowly, with water, and with some moving around (mingle with friends, walk to a new bar a few blocks away after a drink or two**, dance) so that our livers have time to deal with everything.
All alcohol makes it hard for your liver to release glucose and lowers BGLs. Normally, when your BGLs drop, your pancreas and liver communicate with each other†, and your liver releases glucose into the bloodstream to prevent low BGLs (hypoglycemia). Alcohol inhibits your liver’s ability to put glucose into the bloodstream - so even if BGLs don’t drop that low, the liver isn’t able to regulate things it normally does and we have metabolic imbalance. Metabolic imbalance is stress.
“Sugar crashes” make us feel hungry. All of this leads to our brains thinking - correctly - that our livers are not able to put glucose into the bloodstream. Which then leads our brains to thinking - incorrectly!! - that our livers must not have the supplies available to make and release glucose. Unless you’re having a post-marathon or endurance cycling session beer, you do in fact have enough glycogen. You just can’t access it. You don’t need more food. But you want it because alcohol has messed up communication between your liver and brain.
Metabolic tips for avoiding over-eating when (responsibly!) enjoying adult drinks:
Stay hydrated! This helps your liver do its job better and faster.
Choose alcohol + food combinations that won’t create a “sugar crash”.
Dance (aka move around) to increase circulation so your brain, liver, and pancreas can communicate faster through signals in the bloodstream!
†For my nerds: Glucagon is released by the pancreas when BGLs are low and this stimulates gluconeogenesis and glycogenolysis in the liver. The liver also senses BGLs via the high binding affinity of hexokinase IV (HK IV; aka glucokinase), which acts as a rheostat to let the liver know when BGLs are high (glucose binds to HK IV) or when they start dropping (glucose stops binding to HK IV). Consistent BGLs are so important that there are multiple mechanisms and layers of regulation.
*I have a penchant for nachos and an entire rating system to compare across establishments, I take nachos seriously.
**And I mean WALK. Don’t ride your bike. You are not good at biking while drunk and please don’t end up with a nasty scar or more serious injury before you take this to heart. This will be the one and only time I am not pro-biking.
McMonagle, J. and P. Felig. (1975) Effects of ethanol ingestion on glucose tolerance and insulin secretion in normal and diabetic subjects. Metabolism.
Emanuele, N.V. et al. (1998). Consequences of alcohol use in diabetics. Alcohol Health and Research World.
