Does beer make you fat?

Obvious really, of course it does. So says everyone, don't be so silly. I've been having this battle with my mum (battle of wits, not land invasions, rocket attacks, claymores clashing and the like). See, she's really healthy. She eats properly, goes to the gym every day, takes long walks on the beach on weekends, and I look like Hurly from Lost. The reason why I am overweight, so she tells me, is because I'm a bit of a lager fiend. I cannot deny this, everyone knows that beer is fattening and I have never questioned it. But then I did. Thinking about it, I wondered how something with no fat in it can make you fat. Kebabs, chocolate, mayonnaise etc, yeah, they all have a huge fat content so of course they make you fat.

I decided to have a sniff around to satisfy my curiousity. If beer, with no fat, can make you fat, then I'd love to know how it works.

I did some Google action - 'Does beer make you fat' - and was quite surprised at the response. Only a couple of results made this claim, but reading further, neither of these actually supported their claim. They were more or less like 'Beer makes you fat, stop drinking beer as it's bad for you and you will be fat if you drink beer. Fatty'. I asked a friend of mine who is a nurse and she said the same thing. When I asked her WHY it makes you fat, she couldn't answer and just gave me the usual 'because of the calories, the sugar content, sugar turns to fat' answer.

Here's my theory;

Beer doesn't make you fat. Fat makes you fat. Beer does contain a lot of sugar, sugar = calories. A calorie is a unit of measurement for energy. The body needs to burn off energy (calories) before it can burn off fat. Therefore if you drink 10 pints of lager, and then ate a burger, your body would have to burn off the calories of the beer, before it got to the task of burning off the physical fat contained in the burger. Unless your body has a metabolism the speed of a Ferrari, this is unlikely to happen, resulting in the fat from the burger being absorbed by the system and turned into body fat. Now if you drank your 10 pints, and didn't have a burger, your body would go about the task of slowly burning off the calories. If you ate no fat for the duration of the time that your body takes to burn off the calories, you would not put on one milligram of fat. The proof I have for this bold theory is that I have never seen a fat alcoholic.

I am not a medical man and am willing to be told the error of my ways. If there is anyone out there that can prove that beer makes you fat, I will gladly listen. Until then, cheers.