Just popping in to support
@KennyA in his discourse about digested carbs in the presence of alcohol. There are quite a lot of these kind of blind spots in the literature, and it makes learning as a layman really tough. The accepted position is that the Liver prioritises metabolising alcohol first, as it's the only organ in the body that can, and otherwise alcohol is toxic. This, interestingly enough, is exactly the same for Fructose, which of course, is only alcohol that has not been fermented (to be clear that is a definite over-simplification, but it bears repeating that alcohol does a bunch of additional things, but at the base level, is just another form of sugar).
But - as
@KennyA says - if the liver is busy dealing with the alcohol, the digested carbs don't just disappear, they will be broken down into base sugars and transported to the liver as normal, then what happens can only really be this;
We talk about the liver "prioritising" - because we are human, and tend to explain things by personifying. The liver is of course, not deciding or prioritising anything, just sending signals to the Pancreas to stimulate the hormones to manage sugar levels, Insulin if high, Glycogen if low.
Reading through the thread again, (and I'm casting no stones here at all, I'm certainly a slave to data, obsessed with measuring everything until I feel that I understand a process, it's literally what I've trained to do my entire life) there is a danger in focussing on Glucose. Blood Glucose levels are of course a problem as a diagnosed Type 1 or 2, but it's really a question of Insulin. Wearing a CGM, you can definitely learn a lot about your body's response to different foods, but in the end it's about reducing the repeated, elevated levels of insulin which is the major (but not only) driver of Insulin Resistance.
Coming back to the specific topic (and I promise there was a need for the detour) - what happens to the digested carbs ... depends on your
current response to insulin.
A younger person (and we know this instinctively) with a "good, sensitive" response to insulin, will have a flood of insulin, that will kick off a bunch of processes, leading to the alcohol and sugar being metabolised quickly and packed away in the muscles and fat storage tissue, often leaving a lower BG than the starting point (this is normal, and again, we instinctively know this, with the morning after cravings). But - a person with insulin resistance will have an even higher flood of insulin, but not nearly the same effect. Don't want to get into more detail than that, but for sure, a CGM will give you insight, and for sure, at least in my experience, not having that alcohol or carbs makes this all much easier, and you don't have to worry about the numbers, because it turns out that the liver is super effective if you give it a chance (and for
me that means accepting that I really have been making things difficult for my liver for several decades, and it deserves a break)
Just to add, in case I sound like a prissy teetotal convert - I've had a whole bunch of fun in my life related to alcohol, I'm not in any way judging - just that as I reduced drinking in the last couple of years, my tolerance reduced as well, to the point that I now get a headache and my head starts to buzz even with a single glass of fizz. I've just gotten to the point where I'm happier overall not drinking anything.
