I’m so unclear with this.Talking straight rum, vodka, distilled.
Some say it turns to sugar, or is processed in the blood as sugar or glucose.
The holidays are here, and i want some drinks!
I’m not a lush, but HEY!!! Who dosn’t like to party a bit.
@richard do you know with your lovely science mind!
&/or ANYONE! 
Ethanol, while it is a carbohydrate, does not turn into glucose in the body. Instead, it is metabolized in the liver, by a well-understood metabolic pathway.
The same pathway is used to metabolize fructose (which makes up half of table sugar—sucrose—the other half being glucose), so if you’d like to learn about it, take a look at Dr. Robert Lustig’s lecture, “Sugar: The Bitter Truth.” The lecture is about how fructose is as bad for us as ethanol, but he gives a description of the ethanol/fructose pathway in the course of it, to show what the damage is. While the lecture is interesting and scarily informative, you might prefer to skip directly to the part about the metabolic pathway, which if I recall correctly, is about a third of the way in:
BTW, you are likely to find that keto decreases your tolerance for liquor, thus making you a very cheap date, lol!
I’ve been wondering about this myself. I don’t really ever drink anymore except every now and again on a cheat day, but it’d be cool to be able to have a scotch every now and again if it didn’t ruin my keto (because I’d have scotch on non-cheat days). I’ll check out the video when I get somewhere with decent internet! Thanks!
Peter Attia recently addressed this issue.
As @PaulL says above, ethanol is directly metabolised in the liver into acetaldehyde, which is very toxic and rapidly broken down to acetate, which is then excreted as CO2 and water.
The clear spirits - vodka, gin, tequila etc - do not contain sugar, but brown spirits - scotch, bourbon, rum etc - do.
I personally love a wine, but have been looking around to find a low alcohol, low carb white wine.
I have found just such a beast in Australia, called Lindemans Early Harvest Crisp Dry White. Only 5.1 standard drinks per bottle (750 ml), 8.5% alcohol and 0.7% carbs. A couple of glasses every now and then is just lovely and I can budget those carbs easily.
Ted Naiman is of the opinion that alcohol causes your blood sugar to go down. I have not seen that effect when using my continuous glucose monitor, but I only drink 1 drink at night, and my blood sugar is falling then anyway.
I haven’t seen any blood sugar rise from scotch or bourbon using a continuous glucose monitor. Again, I only drink 1 drink usually, and I drink after dinner, so often it’s muddled with whatever I’ve eaten from dinner.
When I look up nutrients in the Brown distilled alcohols I see them listed as 0 sugar and 0 carb
Hi @TeeCee, maybe you are right. I was quoting Peter Attia, so he might be wrong about the sugar.
Right - and for people who have been eating very low-carb, who are in ketosis with the liver making the small amount of glucose that parts of the body do need, there is some danger with alcohol - that it will stop the liver from making that sugar. Obviously - the more alcohol, the longer the body will take to get rid of it, and the longer the potentially bad effects have time to build up or occur.
I think it applies even more with people who are fasting for multiple days, where there’s no question that gluconeogenesis is going on in the liver and that the body really needs that to continue.
This is a fantastic sciencey article regarding the impact of alcohol on glycemic control and insulin action -