Barry Groves, PhD - "Exposing dietary misinformation"
"On the other hand, there is Banting's evidence. He took six glasses of claret a day and a glass of rum or something like that most nights when he went to bed, and still he lost weight.
Another researcher working with low-carb diets, Dr Gaston Pawan, of the Middlesex Hospital, London, mentioned the intriguing possibility that alcoholic drinks, by dilating the blood vessels in the skin and making it work harder, may step up metabolism to an extent which more than compensated for the calories taken in as alcohol. This increased metabolism, coupled with increased loss of water from the skin and in the urine, he opined, could then result in weight loss. There is experimental evidence for this.
Pawan's colleague, Professor Alan Kekwick found that obese patients who were losing weight satisfactorily on a high-fat, low-calorie diet, would still continued to lose if alcohol was added in amounts up to as much as 500 calories a day — which is equivalent to about a seven fluid ounces (190ml) of 37.5% gin or vodka. But if that extra 500 calories were given as a carbohydrate-rich food such as chocolate or bread, they stopped losing weight and started to gain. It seems probable that all alcoholic drinks except those such as beer or sweet wines and liqueurs which contain large amounts of carbohydrate, are not fattening. "
