Alcohol & Diabetes: Can Alcohol Cause Diabetes?

Our treatment center in Palm Beach is looking into alcohol-induced diabetes, signs that you may have it, and possible side effects. So yes, you can still drink, but you need to be aware of how it can affect your body and how diabetes and alcohol blackouts to manage this. For example, drinking can make you more likely to have a hypo, because alcohol interferes with your blood sugar levels. It can affect your weight too, as there can be a lot of calories in alcoholic drinks.

• However, the organization recommends that females with diabetes limit their consumption to one drink per day and males limit their consumption to two drinks per day.
• Programs typically last 30 to 90 days but may last longer depending on the progress and needs of each patient.
• People with type 2 continue to produce insulin in early disease stages; however, their bodies do not respond adequately to the hormone (i.e., the patients are resistant to insulin’s effects).
• Many people who regularly drink, and experience significant personal and social consequences as a result, often have a hard time admitting that they have drinking problems.
• If someone chooses to consume alcohol, they should have food with it and keep a close watch on their blood sugar.

That can make it especially difficult to get a grip on how many carbs and calories you’re consuming. Diabetes Strong does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Beer, for example, varies in its carb-count but those carbs are coming from a very starchy source–grain. So you may find that one bottle of beer calls for 1 unit of insulin while two glasses of pinot grigio doesn’t require any insulin.

Effects of Alcohol on Diabetes

Alcohol-related blackouts are gaps in a person’s memory for events that occurred while they were intoxicated. These gaps happen when a person drinks enough alcohol to temporarily block the transfer of memories from short-term to long-term storage—known as memory consolidation—in a brain area called the hippocampus. Drinking to the point of a blackout has gained pop culture notoriety in recent years. Alcohol-induced blackouts can lead to impaired memory of events that transpired while intoxicated, and a drastically increased risk of injuries and other harms.

This can lead to dependence and addiction, which can cause a person to become unable to function normally without alcohol in their system. Finally, alcohol can also interact with common medicines prescribed for diabetes, including chlorpropamide (Diabinese), metformin, and troglitazone. Drinking while taking one or more of these medications may cause them to work less effectively and cause side effects such as nausea and vomiting. Extremely intoxicated individuals have significant balance and coordination issues. Even standing and walking short distances can lead to trip and fall accidents, concussions, lacerations, bruises, and more.

What is Diabetes?

Glucagon is a hormone that stimulates the release of sugar into the blood. In some people, the initial reaction may feel like an increase in energy. But as you continue to drink, you become drowsy and have less control over your actions. Because denial is common, you may feel like you don’t have a problem with drinking. You might not recognize how much you drink or how many problems in your life are related to alcohol use. Listen to relatives, friends or co-workers when they ask you to examine your drinking habits or to seek help.

One study estimated that the odds of experiencing a blackout is about 50% when blood alcohol content reaches 0.22 percent. You may not have any memory of the time that’s passed when your blood alcohol content is above that threshold. Because many of the symptoms of hypoglycemia—such as slurred speech, drowsiness, confusion, or difficulty walking—are also symptoms of being drunk, it can be difficult to tell the two apart. And if you often have hypoglycemia unawareness, a condition in which you don’t recognize you’re going low, drinking becomes especially dicey. Timing may also be an issue, as hypoglycemia can strike hours after your last drink, especially if you’ve been exercising.

Pathophysiology of Diabetes Mellitus

However, some typical contributing factors result in insulin lack and excess glucagon levels, thereby promoting the development of ketoacidosis. As mentioned earlier in this article, poor food intake can lead to depleted glycogen levels. Furthermore, continued alcohol metabolism results in diminished gluconeogenesis. Both the depletion of glycogen and diminished gluconeogenesis lead to lower blood sugar levels. Because insulin restrains glucagon secretion, lower insulin secretion allows increased glucagon secretion, setting the stage for the development of ketoacidosis.

The relationship of alcohol consumption to cardiovascular disease in diabetic people has not been well evaluated. However, substantial information on the association of alcohol and cardiovascular disease exists from population studies that included an unknown percentage of diabetics. Those findings suggest that alcohol consumption, particularly moderate consumption, may have a protective effect against cardiovascular disease. People with both diabetes and alcoholism and people with diabetes who often drink also increase their risk of worsening their symptoms. Alcohol can worsen diabetes by blocking the production of glucose in the liver, which can result in very low blood sugar levels. The symptoms of low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) are usually similar to the side effects of alcohol, making it difficult to differentiate the two.

Should you still teach your friends (and yourself) how to administer emergency glucagon to use if you’re struggling with severe hypoglycemia and vomiting while drinking? But keep in mind that it isn’t going to raise your blood sugar nearly as quickly as it would when you are sober. Depending on the severity of your diabetes and other related health considerations, it may be a good idea to quit or limit your use of alcohol, as alcohol has a big effect on your blood sugar levels. For some, the struggle of alcohol use precedes their development of diabetes. In other cases, a person may develop a problem with drinking at some point after. In any case, alcohol use in both diabetics and nondiabetics can have deadly consequences without treatment.

For example, a 12-ounce beer may have as low as nine grams of carbs, while a five-ounce glass of wine has about four. Though there are carb-heavy drinks—dessert wines, for example—they do not necessarily make for a better drinking option. The problem is that the liver cannot perform both functions at the same time. When it is busy doing this, it does not release stored carbohydrates to maintain blood sugar, meaning that blood sugar levels can drop to dangerous levels. Doctors advise some people with diabetes to abstain from alcohol for reasons unrelated to their blood sugar.