tammie123 (Offline)

Right, I'm naff at biochemistry, but I've had a bit of a google. I can't find anything on the effects of glucose metabolism in the liver specifically, but I did find one paper on whole-body measurements of metabolism (if you're super keen, it's this one: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC329642/, though it'll be pretty hard to understand if you're not used to reading papers).

As far as I can tell, it says that administering intravenous alcohol doesn't reduce baseline rate of carbohydrate oxidation. However, if you then administer IV glucose after the alcohol, the rate of carbohydrate oxidation doesn't increase, whereas giving the same amount of glucose without the alcohol increases carbohydrate oxidation by 249%. Furthermore, in subjects without alcohol, giving glucose decreases fat oxidation a fair bit, but giving alcohol and glucose decreases fat oxidation to pretty much zero.

The discussion bit study of this study (= what the scientists who wrote it think is going on) says:
Alcohol replaces fat as the main oxidative fuel, providing ~66% of basic energy requirements.
Alcohol doesn't seem to inhibit normal carbohydrate oxidation-this might be because at rest, carbohydrate oxidation contributes less than 20% of total metabolic rate, so doesn't get affected as much as fat oxidation, which contributes the most to metabolic rate (~70%). There may actually be a small inhibition of normal carbohydrate metabolism, but if there is, the effect is too small to show a statistically significant effect in the sample size they used.
If you give lots of glucose, this would normally be oxidised fairly quickly, but alcohol stops this from happening because the alcohol is oxidised in favour of the glucose.

tl;dr: Under normal resting conditions, the demands of carbohydrate oxidation seem to be too small for alcohol to inhibit it. Alcohol will, however, pretty much stop the rate of carbohydrate oxidisation from going any higher.