Hello health champions today I'm going to talk to you about alcoholic drinks on
a low-carb ketogenic diet how does alcohol affect ketosis and what kind of
drinks are most likely to keep you in ketosis versus knock you out of ketosis
coming right up
hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if
you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works
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anything relaxing and socializing is a very
important aspect of life and for many people that involves having an alcoholic
drink or two but if you also want to reduce insulin resistance you want to be
in ketosis then how do you combine the two how does that work well the thing to
keep in mind is that most alcoholic drinks have two things in them that can
have some damage one is alcohol and the other is sugar or carbohydrate so
obviously if you're gonna have an alcoholic beverage it's gonna have some
alcohol in it so that means we want to minimize the sugar and the carbs so we
just get one bad thing in there so to speak alcohol is a poison if the dose
gets high enough so it's kind of like sugar that it's not an unnatural
substance it's just that it rather quickly becomes toxic because it
requires the liver to metabolize it it's a burden on the body so when it comes to
sugar and alcohol the first aspect the first variable we want to look at is
blood sugar because if something increases blood sugar now it's going to
trigger insulin and it's going to promote insulin resistance it's going to
kick us out of ketosis the other aspect is how does it affect the liver because
insulin is going to have an impact on the liver
and make it insulin resistant but there's two other things namely fructose
and alcohol that are going to congest the liver directly in addition to the
effects of insulin so therefore we want to understand how these variables affect
the liver and affect ketosis and affect insulin so obviously we want to keep if
we're gonna have some alcohol we want to keep the sugar as low as possible if
something has sugar it means it has glucose and fructose and if we add that
to the alcohol now we kind of have a triple whammy so the kind of drinks you
absolutely want to avoid are things like mixed drinks and wine coolers because
for a given amount of alcohol let's call it one serving of alcohol which is
generally thought of as one beer or one to one and a half ounces of straight
liquor or a five six ounce glass of wine the mixed coolers and the wine coolers
are by far the worst because in addition to the alcohol something like a daiquiri
or a pina colada will have 30 to 35 grams of pure sugar
and again half of that is going to be fructose which is going to congest the
liver the glucose is going to jack up your insulin it's going to kick you out
of ketosis and the fructose and the alcohol is going to stress your liver
the next thing you want to avoid are things like hard cider they're becoming
very popular these days when people think that oh well something fruit based
is so much better but they turn out to be very sweet the very driest of the
ciders are going to have probably around 15 grams of sugar and the one that you
consider more normal are gonna have 25 or even more grams of sugar in 1 12
ounce serving even worse are the so called hard lemonade's so these are
going to have anywhere from 25 to 3 grams of sugar per bottle in addition to
the alcohol and for those of you who have tried that you know that the sugar
is a very addictive in addition to the alcohol so it's very very easy to go
through several of those drinks and then the sugar adds up very very quickly so
that would be the category to absolutely avoid and then the next category would
be liqueurs and cordials and this is straight booze it's strong liquor which
has added sugar they have essences and orange and fruit flavors and essential
oils and things like that added to them but they're extremely sweet so something
like almond liqueur or amaretto has 17 grams of sugar per one ounce I don't
know how they even managed to get that amount of sugar into a liquid but it's
basically 50% pure sugar in these sweet liqueurs and Kahlua coffee liqueur is
about the same it's 15 grams of sugar per 1 ounce the average for these
liqueurs like a Grand Marnier or a Cointreau they're gonna run 10 to 15
grams so they're gonna be 30 to 50 percent sugar this is really just liquid
candy so it's not quite as bad as these guys because you're probably not going
to drink as much you probably it's so sweet that you're probably just gonna
have a little bit but you still definitely want to avoid these and you
also want to avoid the mixed drinks that contain these so any mixed drink that's
kind of fruity then they're typically include some of these liqueurs and
cordials in them in addition to the fruit juice and the added sugar so then
we get two beers this is kind of the default drink it's the foundation for a
lot of people it's just what you grab to have something in your hand and we're
going to talk about a 12 ounce serving which is about 350 milliliters for the
overseas people and a regular beer is going to have
around 12 to 14 grams of carbohydrate now this carbohydrate isn't as bad as
this one unless you're allergic or sensitive to gluten or grains because
this carbohydrate is primarily glucose oh yes it's going to have a significant
impact on blood sugar but it's not going to congest the liver because it has
virtually no fructose of course the alcohol is going to still affect the
liver but if you want to count a 1 to 1 gram on beer versus this I would
probably say that the beer isn't quite as bad which doesn't make it good in any
way of course a lot of light beers are going to be in the 3 to 6 gram per
serving range so they have about half as much or less but there's still some
light beers out there that are a lot higher than that there might be 7 or 8
or 9 grams so don't think that just because it says light that it is very
low in carbohydrates and because of the low carb and the keto movement and
because of all the micro breweries and the interest in in craft beers there are
a lot of new low carb beers including IPAs and ales that have a lot more
flavor than the traditional light beers but still managed to keep the carbs the
total carbs in the 2 to 4 gram range so if you're a beer lover then that would
be a positive development and something that might be a huge surprise to some
people because you think that non-alcoholic beers well they're just
really kind of watery they don't have a whole lot of flavor they can't be a lot
of carbs in those rights well wrong they are actually 20 to 30 grams they're
about twice as much carbs as a regular beer and it's because they start off
with a regular beer and then they take the alcohol out but then they have to
add something back in to give it some flavor and that's something they add
back in is usually sugar and it doesn't taste super sweet
because the beer is a little bitter to start with so non-alcoholic would be the
thing to avoid because that really is a slice of bread in a liquid slice of
bread in a glass so for sure avoid the top avoid them though mixed drinks wine
coolers liquors and cordials if you're gonna have a beer then you're best off
with the Lite beers or the low-carb and definitely avoid the regulars or the non
alcoholics now we're getting to the stuff that is a little bit better if you
want to call it that so if you're gonna drink and some people will drink
regardless then limit it to one or two drinks for the most part make sure that
you have a few days a week where you don't drink so that that liver doesn't
get that constant burden and now what you want to focus on drinking or things
like dry wine so it's going to depend on the wine this is just a generalization
but a dry red or a dry white wine it's going about 3 to 4 grams of sugar or
carbs per glass and that's for about a 5 to 6 ounce glass and then for festive
occasions a lot of times people will pull out the bubbly the sparkling wine
or the champagne so what we refer to as champagne is really all sparkling wines
except a sparkling wine that's called champagne can only come from a certain
district in France but they all follow the same rules pretty much and it turns
out that the naming can be a little bit confusing because there's 7 different
classifications of how sweet it is so they start with a dry white wine which
is usually a little more acidic it's not it's a little less sweet than a white
wine and because of that they add a little bit of sugar to the bottle before
they cork it and districtís the least sugar is something called Brut nature
and there they have added zero sugar so this is just the sparkling white
then there's another category called extra brut then there is brutes there's
extra dry dry demi-sec and dews and each of these then increase in how much sugar
they add and most of the champagne most of the sparkling wine that sold about
90% is in the Brut category which means they have less than 12 grams per liter
of added sugar so it can be a little confusing because a lot of times you
look at this and you go we'll Brut and extra dry it sort of seems like extra
dry would be drier than than almost anything else but that's not how it
works and the reason is that they went from
really sweet champagne and then they made it drier and drier and drier till
they got to extra dry but then over time they made it even drier so now they had
to come up with new names to go beyond the extra dry so I would suggest that
you avoid the bottom half of those categories the extra dry the dry the
demi-sec and the dew because they are basically very very sugary they have
added sugar so go for Brut or extra Brut and if you can find it then go to the
Brut nature now they start off with a white wine so that's gonna have some
carbohydrate in it to start with it's not zero so it's a little confusing when
they tell you how many grams of sugar is in a glass of sparkling wine because
they usually only talk about the added sugar so I couldn't really find any good
numbers on this but I'm gonna assume that the wine that they start with is
gonna have about two to three grams of sugar of carbs per glass and then in the
parenthesis it represents how much sugar was added and then what we get as the
total carbs for that so a Brut nature would be about 3 grams
an extra Brut would be about 4 and a glass of broop would be about
five grams of carbs in it so again one glass on a festive occasion is probably
going to be okay kind of like a glass of white wine just avoid the sugary stuff
and don't go overboard but if you want to have an occasional drink and avoid
the sugar as much as possible then you want to look in this last category and
this is the straight liquor and I use a mixer called Z BIA it is I don't know if
it's available everywhere but it is a really good soda that is no artificial
sweeteners no artificial colors it is really nice it's bubbly it has fruit
flavors it has Cola flavors but it's sweetened with stevia only if you start
off with either a straight shot of rum vodka gin or whiskey if you like it on
the rocks or neat then you're gonna have something with zero grams of sugar zero
grams of carbs because these are distillates so there is nothing even if
it was made from beer or made from grapes they basically evaporate the
alcohol they keep some of the flavor with it but there are no carbs in there
so if you mix something like a dry martini which is gin and vermouth then
you're going to be very close to zero grams so there are some mixed drinks
that don't use the sugary sweeteners the sugary mixers and then you might be okay
there's something also very popular called a skinny B and I can't say the
rest of the word but this is basically where you start with vodka or gin or
tequila you add some bubbly just soda water and then you squeeze some lime in
there and a lot of people really like that it's very fresh very light and it
has zero carbs so you can play around with that and if you have Devia
available in your neighborhood then you can just combine the Sevilla with some
liquor and now you have lemon-lime soda you have Coke soda Dr Pepper
equivalents and you just mix it up with some rum and gin and vodka and I like to
put a squeeze a lime in there as well and now you're still at zero grams of
carbs other than the fraction of a gram that you get from the lime juice and I
also like an occasional keto margarita and basically what you do there is you
just take about equal parts of tequila and fresh lime juice you put it in a
blender with some crushed ice and you sweetened with stevia to taste and then
you can put some salt on the rim if you like that and it is really pretty close
to a regular margarita but a regular margarita will have probably in the
neighborhood of 15 grams of sugar whereas this one is going to have less
than one gram from that lime juice alcohol is not something I recommend I
know it is something that a lot of people are going to drink anyways
stick with the stuff that's going to create the least amount of harm if you
enjoyed this video make sure you check out that one thank you so much for