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 make sure you so you don't miss 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