When we are told we have diabetes we may well be advised that we should certainly limit and probably stop drinking alcohol all together.

Now, most of my patients think that the reason for that is because alcohol is after all a food, it contains lots of sugar and lots of energy and therefore it's part of controlling the whole process of your diabetes. And that much is absolutely right, it's true, but there is something that is possibly even more important. When we take in alcohol it goes straight into our stomach and then directly to our liver, and it happens very quickly. Once it gets to our liver where it's going to be processed (metabolized) the enzymes the chemicals in liver that are going to do that are called preferential enzymes. That means they will deal with the alcohol before anything else, regardless of what else is going on. 

So what happens to the sugar? (either the sugar in the alcohol, or perhaps in the food that you've eaten with it) Well the answer is not much, nothing really happens to it. The liver is dealing with the alcohol, which means you can get rapid fluctuations in your blood sugar, up or down.

Posted: 15/01/2009