Beer belly

If you are getting the majority of your calories from alcohol or sugary drinks you will start to expand at the waist. The same goes for snacking and eating all day long. When your body takes in carbs, the glucose gets metabolised throughout the body and only 20% gets to the liver.  So you can see that drinking alcohol immediately makes your liver work 4 times harder. Ethanol does not need insulin to get into the cells so it just diffuses into the liver cells.

Beer Belly Creation

Fructose is processed exclusively in the liver and alcohol is 80% processed in the same manner. When you consume sugars and alcohol you typically have blood sugar levels and glycogen storage that are at their limits, so the liver has only one choice and that is to make fat via lipogenesis. The fatty acids produced by the liver are delivered around the body via the blood. But much of the fat ends up stored in fat tissue, particulary in visceral fat around your abdominal organs. This leads to the creation of a beer belly.

• Alcohol is converted to acetaldehyde which is converted into acetyl-CoA in the liver. Some of this is burnt as energy in the cell mitochondria, but a good portion has to be converted to fat.
• Fructose (the bad sugar) also follows a similar pathway and will lead to fat creation.