What Alcohol Really Does to Your Body

What happens inside your body the moment you take your first sip of alcohol?

In this episode, Kristin Rowell breaks down the science of alcohol metabolism and explains exactly what happens inside your body when you drink.

From the way alcohol is absorbed into your bloodstream to how your liver prioritizes processing it above all other metabolic functions, you'll learn why alcohol impacts far more than just your energy or decision-making. Kristin also shares her personal experience of going alcohol-free for an entire year, what she discovered through the process, and why she now drinks only occasionally.

Whether you're sober-curious, focused on improving your metabolic health, or simply want to understand how alcohol affects your body, this episode offers a practical, educational, and non-judgmental perspective.

In This Episode You'll Learn:

• What happens inside your body when alcohol enters your system
• Why alcohol has its own unique metabolic pathway
• How your liver processes alcohol and why it becomes the body's top priority
• The connection between alcohol, blood sugar, insulin, and fat storage
• How alcohol impacts the brain and every cell in the body
• What current research says about alcohol and cancer risk
• Why Kristin chose to spend a full year alcohol-free
• The relationship between alcohol, energy, and overall wellness

Resources Mentioned:

→ Dry Farm Wines
→ Avaline Wine
→ Nutrisense CGM – Continuous Glucose Monitor
→ Chronometer App – My go-to for tracking food and alcohol

Watch on Youtube: youtube.com/@energeticallyefficient

Connect with Kristin:

1:1 Coaching: Apply here

The Top 5 Things I Actually Do To Stay Under 20% Body Fat: kristin-rowell.mykajabi.com/5-tips

Instagram: instagram.com/kristin_rowell_

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So why did I get on this tangent about insulin and the pancreas when we're talking about alcohol? Because I want you to understand that all of that stuff that the pancreas is doing, sending out insulin to clean up sugar, sending out glucagon to go get sugar from the liver or the muscle or the fat tissue when you haven't eaten for a while. All of those metabolic processes stop when you've had alcohol. The liver literally says, Hey, hey, I'm sorry, pancreas. We're closed for business right now, so you're just gonna have to wait. Hi guys, welcome back to the energetically efficient channel. Today I want to talk to you about alcohol. This is such an interesting topic to me and just so many of my clients that I figured it would be helpful if I would create a short video about it to actually help you guys understand what alcohol does in the body. So there's a huge sober curious movement going on right now, and you may have heard of that. I personally participated in it for one year where I chose for an entire calendar year not to drink any alcohol. And I know that that sounds like, oh wow, Kristen, like that really isn't that hard. And it wasn't. It really was very easy for me. But the reality is, especially because I've never had an experience of being pregnant for nine months, that I didn't ever go that long without alcohol because I was never forced to. So I was like, what would happen if for a year I didn't have any alcohol on my birthday, over the holidays, on vacation, on New Year's, like every single time you would normally have alcohol. What would happen if I just didn't participate in it? And the reality was, like I said, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. And the longer the year went on, the less and less interested I became in drinking alcohol. So I do have alcohol on occasion. It's very rare that I drink it, but I do have it on occasion now. And it's one of those things that I may decide at some point just to totally cut it out, where I never consume it because there isn't any benefit that it gives to my body. So that's what I want to talk about with you guys today is once we consume alcohol, what is actually happening in our body that causes our body to react in the way that it does to the alcohol? So I'm gonna walk you through what the science is of alcohol in the body. And that way you can make a decision for yourself. Do I want to drink alcohol? Do I not want to drink alcohol? And what would be the right choice for me? And that may depend on what stage of life you're in, anything that you're going through. So just listen to the science of it and then decide for yourself if you want to have it. Okay. So the first thing that I want to tell you about alcohol is that when you consume alcohol, it has its own metabolic process. So alcohol is unique to any of our other macronutrients, which I've talked about these in prior videos, which are protein, fat, and carbs. Some scientists also refer to alcohol as a macronutrient. The reality is it's not a macronutrient because it's not a source of calories that the body actually needs. But scientists call it a macronutrient because it has its own metabolic process. And when you consume alcohol, there are approximately seven calories per gram. So when we consume protein, there's four calories per gram. When we consume carbs, there's four calories per gram. When we consume fats, there's nine calories per gram. Alcohol is right in the middle of those at seven calories per gram. So that's why some scientists refer to alcohol as a macronutrient. And what I always remind clients of is you can even track your alcohol consumption on chronometer. So chronometer, which I've talked about in prior videos, is the food tracking app that I use. It also tracks alcohol. So you can go ahead and use chronometer. If you want to see how it impacts your caloric intake and other metrics, alcohol also will have an effect on your blood sugar. And so if you want to try a Nutrisense blood sugar monitor, which is what I use and recommend, you can click on the link below and try that and see what your body does when you consume alcohol. Okay. So the first thing to note is alcohol has its own metabolic process. The next thing to note is once we consume it, literally everything else in your body, and not really everything else, obviously you can still walk around, but most other internal processes that are happening, at least as it relates to your digestive system, are paused. Okay. And the reason for that is that you have a liver. Okay. So your liver is on your right side, kind of behind your right rib cage. And you also have a pancreas, which is on your left side, behind your left rib cage. And I always say that those two organs, your pancreas and your liver, are talking to each other all the time. And the reason they're talking to each other is your pancreas is responsible for the release of a hormone called insulin. And we release insulin after we've eaten a meal, especially a meal that has a tremendous amount of carbohydrate in it. So the higher amount of carbohydrate in the meal, the more insulin is released from your pancreas. And just in case you're curious about this, you guys, and this is one of the reasons that I help people in 101 programs and group coaching programs that I have lose body fat, is because I'm helping their body understand how to tamp down their insulin signaling so that their pancreas isn't spitting insulin out all day long and saying, store fat, store fat, store fat. We don't want that signal being sent from our pancreas all day long. So the lower we can get our insulin, the better in terms of not storing fat. Okay. So what does that have to do with alcohol? Well, the reality is because your liver and pancreas are talking to each other all the time, when we have our first sip of alcohol that goes into our mouth, your liver immediately, immediately prioritizes getting rid of it. It recognizes it as a poison toxin immediately. And it says, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, we have to get this out of this person's body. We have to work on processing this through the liver and getting it out of the body. And so while the liver is doing that, the liver really can't do anything else. Now, your liver is a very, very important, magical and strong and amazing organ that does lots and lots of things for your body. It literally has over 500 different functions in the body. But one of the functions that it has is to process any sort of alcohol that you consume. Now, the liver also processes all the fats you consume, whether they're good fats like avocado or bad fats like the grease and French fries, if they're made in vegetable oil or vegetable oil potato chips or any sort of other pastry or bakery treat with bad oils. The liver is responsible for breaking down all of that fat and processing that too. Your liver also is going to break down and process all of the OTC drugs that you take, okay? Over-the-counter medications. It's also going to process all the prescription medications you can take. So you can imagine the more of these things that you consume, the more of the over-the-counter medications, the more prescription medications, the more fats, good, healthy, bad, or otherwise, the more alcohol you consume, your liver is more susceptible, let's say, to taking a beating from all of these things that it's having to process all day long. And alcohol being one of the most significant ones because alcohol is a priority for your liver to get rid of. Okay. So the other thing that happens when you first consume alcohol, other than noting that it has its own metabolic process and that the liver prioritizes getting rid of it, is to note that alcohol is truly indiscriminating in terms of where it can go in the body. Okay. So where fat-soluble molecules really only get synthesized through the liver and water-soluble molecules really only get synthesized through the kidneys, alcohol can go everywhere in terms of its molecular structure. It can literally get into every cell in your body, including your brain. And this is why we've had so much research come out in the last several years about the fact that alcohol is really doing a lot of damage to our brains. It's not good for your brain, in addition to your liver, in addition to all the other cellular function in your body. I believe it was in, and I'm gonna maybe get the year wrong, but I think it was almost as recently as 2023. It may have been 2021 or 2020, but there was, it was in recent years where the American Cancer Society actually declared that in order to ward off and prevent cancers, one of the things you should do is to not drink any alcohol. They have said publicly that there is enough research now for them to conclude that alcohol is going to increase your likelihood of getting a variety of different kinds of cancer. So the American Cancer Society recommends no alcohol. Okay. There's a lot of other really brilliant doctors who would make that same recommendation. And then there's a lot of people who are able to enjoy alcohol in moderate amounts as long as it's a healthy alcohol, as long as they have a healthy relationship with, it's in frequent use, and it's it's used more in their lifestyle as not even a stress reduction tool, but just as enjoyment when they're spending time with friends and family. And again, they're using higher quality alcohol, like something like a dry farms wine. I love dry farms wine. When I used to have a subscription to wine, when I used to bring more of it to parties or have more of it at home or entertain more, that is the kind of wine that I would drink. I think that's a really high quality wine. So we'll put a link below for that. I don't think I have a discount card for you guys. I will work on that, of course. And then another wine that I recommend that's also another higher quality wine is one that Cameron Diaz and her friend put together, which is called Avilene. And you can actually buy Aviline in most uh liquor stores. So you could get that, whereas Dry Farms actually requires a subscription, but it is really high-quality wine from vineyards all over the world. So both of those wines, if you're going to reach for wine, would be one I recommend. Okay. So going back to what alcohol does in the body. So when we first ingest it into our mouth, part of the reason that you can start to feel a buzz relatively quickly, especially if you haven't eaten a meal, is because alcohol doesn't need to be like digested, okay, like a steak. It doesn't need to be broken down in that way and digested because it's just liquid molecules, which means it's immediately absorbed by, and I'm going to put my fingers in my mouth to show you, all of these tissues, your cheeks, your tongue, all of those tissues can absorb the alcohol. So what they're actually absorbing is that ethanol, the ethanol is from the alcohol, and that immediately goes into your bloodstream. So you can start to feel a buzz pretty quickly. Most people say if they drink a little bit of alcohol on a full stomach, that can blunt that buzz sensation a little bit. So it's better to have a little bit of food in your system first because it'll blunt that, but it really does go into your bloodstream, even from right in the tissues in your mouth. Okay, so why does that matter? Well, it matters because, again, it's indiscriminating in terms of where it goes in the body, but also because since your body is immediately recognizing it as a toxin or poison, it goes your body starts to go through this very sophisticated conversion process. And when I first learned about this conversion process, I was like, okay, wait, this actually doesn't make sense. And I'll tell you why in a second. But I was like struggling to figure out why your body would do this. And what I mean by this is your body takes the ethanol, which is the toxic substance in alcohol and it converts it to a substance that is more toxic than alcohol. It converts it to a substance called acetylaldehyde. Now you may be thinking, why would our body do something that would make something that we consume that's already toxic more toxic to us? That doesn't make sense. Our body doesn't want to toxify us. But the reason that it does that is because of the conversion process that the body has to go through to get that ethanol out of the body. We can't just have ethanol go out directly through our urine. It has to go through a conversion process. So the ethanol gets converted into acetylaldehyde, which is a substance that's more toxic than the ethanol. And the enzyme that's used to do that is called acetylaldehyde dehydrogenase. You don't need to learn that, but I'm just telling you that's the substance. And that then gets converted further into acetate, which ultimately gets converted into carbon dioxide and water so that it can then be eliminated from the body. So this is actually a very sophisticated mechanism that the body goes through in order to get the toxic substance out. Your body is not trying to kill you, it's trying to save you. It wants that out of its system. So again, the ethanol gets converted. It ultimately comes down to carbon dioxide and water and then it's eliminated. And how is it eliminated? It's eliminated through your urine because it's filtered through your kidneys, okay, because alcohol is not fat soluble. It's it's water soluble, so it can also go through your liver. It can also go through your kidneys, so it goes through both your liver and your kidneys. It also can come out through your sweat. Anyone who has been to a gym on a Saturday or Sunday morning, sweating next to someone who had a bender the night before can attest to the fact that alcohol comes through your pores. You can smell it. People have probably had that experience themselves. So you can smell alcohol coming through your pores. It definitely comes through your urine. And then, of course, it comes through your breath. These are ways that our body releases toxins in addition to our fecal matter. So alcohol is getting out of your body in all sorts of ways, but those are your primary detox pathways. Okay. So when we are going through this conversion process in the body, a really important thing to understand, and this is why I brought up the pancreas earlier, because I want you to understand how this works in conjunction with the liver. The liver is literally saying, stop, every, everything, liver's closed for business, guys. No, no one bring me any messages. I don't want to communicate with any of you, pancreas. You have to go to sleep. I can't talk to you right now. Please, please, please leave me alone because my priority right now is getting the alcohol out of the body. So I always say, if you picture the liver on the right and the pancreas on the left, I'm making this up. This isn't actually what happens, but I want you to picture that the liver basically builds a dam between the pancreas and the liver and basically says to the pancreas, yeah, yeah, we're closed. You're gonna have to wait over there for whatever you want my attention for. I can't deal with you right now. Okay, I can't deal with you. And so the pancreas, which is this amazing organ that's responsible for secreting insulin in response to the consumption of food, obviously, more specifically, that has more carbohydrates, or it's responsible for the secretion of glucagon, which is the hormone that opposes insulin. So glucagon is a hormone that's your fat burning hormone. Insulin is a hormone that's your fat storage hormone. Okay. So neither insulin or glucagon can get the message to the liver that it either wants to store carbs in the liver as a form, a storage form of glycerol, which is called glycogen. So I want you to pretend that you just ate a bunch of carbohydrates. Let's say you ate a bunch of candy, you ate some cookies, whatever it was, a bunch of bread, it doesn't matter. In response to that meal, the pancreas is gonna shoot out insulin because it's gonna say, uh-oh, uh-oh. We have a lot of glycerol molecules, a lot of sugar molecules in the bloodstream right now. The blood sugar is going up and up and up. We've got to clean that sugar out of the blood. We've got to get all this sugar. Sugar is very stressful in the bloodstream. So we have to get it out of the bloodstream. And this person either has to use it by like walking, strength training, doing some sort of activity, or if the person is just sitting there eating this very sugary carbohydrate meal, then we're gonna have to put all of those glycerol molecules in storage. So what the insulin does is it shuttles the glycerol molecules into the liver for storage. And once that sugar gets stored in the liver, it's called glycogen. Okay. Now, when the liver gets full of glycogen, the liver gets to store about 400 or so calories of glycogen. It's not that much. Okay. Keep in mind if you had a bagel yesterday and you had potatoes the night before and you had a cookie the day before that, and you had oatmeal the day before that, and you didn't move or didn't have any activity and never engaged in intermittent fasting, your liver may be very full of glycogen already. Okay. This is one of the reasons we have a serious problem in this country in America with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. That's a thing. It's a thing that is afflicting kids nowadays, you guys. It's it's so sad, I can hardly handle it. But these are livers that are full of sugar. Okay. The livers that don't, it's a person who doesn't get enough activity. They eat way too much carbohydrate and their liver is full of sugar. So let's pretend you're not that person. So you, or, or your liver just happens to be full of sugar and you've eaten enough sugar in a meal where now your liver says, I'm sorry, I can't take anymore. I've got 400 calories here. You've got a pancreas, insulin. I know you're trying to talk to me. We've got to put it somewhere else. And now that sugar will get stored in your skeletal muscle. Okay. It gets stored here in your muscle. So I always say that I'm walking around with a 20-gallon storage tank for carbs, where most people are walking around with five. The more muscle you can put on your body, and I could talk about this for hours on end, you guys. The more muscle you put on your body, the more carb sensitive you become, the more carbs you can eat without consequence. Muscles are a sponge for carbohydrates. They're like, they love them. Muscles love carbs because carbs get to be stored there and it makes your muscles work even stronger. Now, I'm not advocating that you eat a ton of carbs in order to build muscle. I can very much help people build muscle on a well-formulated low carbohydrate lifestyle. But the reality is that carbs do get stored in the muscle when we consume too much of them. And if we consume too many of them for our liver and our muscle to take, especially if we don't have a lot of muscle, guess where those carbs get stored after? Body fat. And body fat can grow and grow and grow and grow and grow until you can become the person who's on the show, the 600-pound life, because you've literally been just massively consuming carbs for however many years that got you to that point. And you've now created a broken pancreas regulator for insulin. So you become a fat storage machine. So we don't want that. Okay. So why did I get on this tangent about insulin and the pancreas when we're talking about alcohol? Because I want you to understand that all of that stuff that the pancreas is doing, sending out insulin to clean up sugar, sending out glucagon to go get sugar from the liver or the muscle or the fat tissue when you haven't eaten for a while. All of those metabolic processes stop when you've had alcohol. The liver literally says, Hey, hey, I'm sorry, pancreas. We're closed for business right now. So you're just gonna have to wait. You're gonna have to wait behind this dam. I pretend there's imaginary, or rather, an imaginary, yeah, let's call it a wall or a dam. And the pancreas is like, okay, do. I'm just sitting here. I want to shoot insulin into the body because we've got to clean up the sugar, or I want to shoot glucagon out because this person hasn't eaten in eight hours and they really need to get their blood sugar back up or they're gonna be hypoglycemic. The liver's like, uh-uh, nope, not right now, not right now. And then right after the liver finally gets done processing all the alcohol you consumed. And keep in mind, you guys, depending on how much you drank, that could be anywhere from an hour to many hours. We process on average one unit of alcohol for each hour. Okay, so that means 12 ounces of beer is a unit of alcohol. Five ounces of wine is a unit of alcohol. One ounce of hard liquor, like your tequilas, your vodka's, your whiskey, your scotch, that takes an hour to process. So depending on how many units of alcohol you consumed, it may take hours before your liver is done with the job. And then right when your liver gets done, after all of that alcohol has been processed, which may happen at, I don't know, two in the afternoon if you had a drinking brunch, or it might happen at three in the morning if you had a bender that night. Whenever it happens, the liver's like, okay, pancreas, we're good now. I can talk to you again. Then the pancreas is like, oh, thank God. And if you ate a huge meal, especially one that consumed a lot of carbohydrates with that meal, now the pancreas is going to shoot out a ton of insulin to go and clean the sugar out of the blood. And you're gonna start this blood sugar roller coaster that for many people, especially after they've had drinks, is going to wake them up somewhere between 130 and 3 a.m. It's a very, very common phenomenon for people who drink alcohol or for people who have high carbohydrate diets where they're on a blood sugar roller coaster. So if you are waking up anywhere between 130 and 3 in the morning, typically I would say that's largely what it's from is some sort of communication happening in those hours between your liver and pancreas because of whatever you did or didn't eat or drink the evening before you went to bed. Okay. So the last thing I want to say about alcohol is that I really create no judgment or any sort of views on whether people choose to drink or choose not to drink. But I want to leave you with this tip regarding alcohol and energy. Because every time I make a conscious decision to drink some alcohol, I have to recognize and own and take responsibility for that one of the consequences of that choice is it's going to downgrade for a period of time. It's going to lower my frequency resonance. And frequency and energy is something that I will talk about plenty on this channel. We'll get into lots more videos about that. But basically, the frequency resonance at which you vibrate, because you are an energetic being, you are a vibrational being that is emitting a vibration into this world. You have a frequency that you emit, and your frequency is unique to you. Alcohol is going to lower it. And that I don't love. I'm just going to be really honest with you. That is one of the most important reasons to me for choosing not to have alcohol, is because it truly lowers your frequency, which means it's depleting your energy. And I don't even mean energy like get up and go and excitement. I mean your vibration. I mean that you are going to now, for the period of time until you raise your frequency vibration back up, once you've cleared your body from the alcohol and engaged in some meditation and other activities to raise your vibration, more videos on that in the future. You're going to have to deal with the fact and accept that you've now lowered your frequency resonance a little bit, which here's the reality, guys. Is that the end of the world? No. All of us are on a frequency bandwidth. You, you, your frequency resonance is on a bandwidth. Some days you're down here, some days you're up here, and many days you're floating in between there. You could be lower, you could be higher. It just depends on the choices that you're making. It depends on the food you're eating. It depends on the social media you're consuming. It depends on how you spend your time. It depends on how much you're sleeping. Again, I'll do a whole teaching on that in a separate video. But the main point that I want to leave you with about alcohol is that it can, and it does rather, drop your frequency resonance a bit after you decide to consume it. So all of that said, everyone's choice with alcohol is their own. I love that there's this sober curious movement. I love that there are all sorts of people who aren't, you know, diagnosed as alcoholics, who are simply choosing to live an alcohol-free life. I've said for many years that I think it is possible in our lifetimes that we will at some point look at alcohol the way we now look at smoking, which is it's not good for you. Just because it's legal doesn't mean we should be doing it. And so we'll just have to stay tuned to see if that's what actually happens. Okay. So thank you for listening to my video about alcohol. I hope you found this helpful. I would love for you to comment below if there's anything that you learned specifically. And as always, I would love for you to subscribe to the video as well. Thanks so much for being here, and I will see you in the next video.