Alcohol & Your Health - Whats The Link?
With us approaching more winter months and more celebratory holidays such as Christmas and New Years, most of us will likely experience an increase in our consumption of alcoholic drinks. For this reason, I wanted to write a post on the topic of drinking and what kinds of effects alcohol has on our body and general health, especially because alcohol is rather seen as more of a social norm during holiday events or social gatherings.
I hope you enjoy this thorough piece on alcohol and its effects, I put quite a lot of effort into this one.
ABOUT ALCOHOL
Alcohol is widely recognized as being a psychoactive drug that has been used in many cultures for centuries. Alcohol predominantly has a depressant effect on our body, meaning that it slows down our pulse, breathing rate, thoughts as well as actions.
Nowadays there is a variety of alcoholic beverages made, with different combinations of flavors and additives, which alter the alcohol percentage of a drink.
When we talk about alcohol, we are mainly referring to beverages counting a mix of ethanol (C₂H₆O) and water, where ethanol is the basic form of alcohol present. In most cases, ethanol is first derived from the fermentation of sugars found within a variety of fruits and vegetables (such as grapes and potatoes) and later distilled to produce a more pure alcoholic product.
METABOLIZING ALCOHOL
It is said that our bodies are able to metabolize alcohol at a rate of about one drink per hour or around 0.015 g / 100mL / hour.
Once alcohol enters our system, it is quickly absorbed by our stomach (especially if we have not eaten in a while) and small intestines, after which it enters our blood stream and travels to our liver for filtration.
Once in the liver, our liver releases many enzymes which break down the alcohol, however the issue is that our liver is only able to process so much alcohol at once, meaning that even after some time, a lot of alcohol still circulates around our blood. Therefore, it may take up to several hours (depending on how much we drink), for our body to process all all alcohol in our blood.
There are also several factors which determine how effective your body is at processing alcohol in your blood stream:
Gender: Females tend to eliminate alcohol faster than males
Age: Teens, young adults, and older adults processes alcohol at a slower rate
Food: Metabolism rate increases with ingested food
Time of day: Alcohol metabolizes faster at the end of the day
Exercise: Alcohol is eliminated slightly faster during exercise than when stationary
Alcoholism: Heavy drinking increases the rate, but advanced liver disease decreases it
HOW DOES ALCOHOL IMPACT OUR BODY?
SHORT TERM EFFECTS
Drinking alcoholic beverages can have the following short term effects on our body and mind:
Feeing more relaxed and drowsy
Changes in our mood and emotional stability
More impulsive behavior
A sense of euphoria
Lowered inhibitions and self awareness
Changes in the perceptions of your surroundings (hearing, vision)
Decline in general coordination
Difficulty making decisions and concentrating
Slowed or slurred speech
Potential vomiting or nausea if we consume too much
Potential head aches
LONG TERM EFFECTS
Consistent Mood Changes
Alcohol encourages our body and brain to frequently change moods and the emotions we feel, which can result in unnecessary anxiety and general irritability.
Issues With Sleeping & Insomnia
If we drink often, we may find that initially alcohol makes it easier for us to fall asleep however the alcohol in our system actually disrupts our sleep cycle during the night which impacts the quality of our sleep. This can cause us to feel sluggish and additionally tired the next day, alongside a possible hangover.
Weaker Immune System
Alcohol severely negatively impacts our bodies natural immune system defense by lowering the amount of antibodies our body can naturally produce to ward off infections and pathogens.
Studies show that people who consume more alcohol are more prone to contracting diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis, compared to people who do not drink a lot. In fact, the World Health Organization says that about 8% of tuberculosis cases in the world are due to alcohol consumption.
Changes In Sexual Function
Serious and frequent drinking may contrarily to belief, actually worsen your libido and sexual performance. Alcohol does so by primarily preventing normal levels of sex hormones to be produced, increasing the odds of experiencing erectile dysfunction and making it harder to achieve orgasm.
For women, excessive drinking may have a negative impact on their menstrual cycle which could lead to infertility issues down the line.
Changes In Appetite and Weight Gain
Most studies say that drinking alcohol actually usually decreases our hunger and appetite levels, due to influencing the appetite and regulating hormones - Grehlin and leptin. However, alcohol itself can carry quite a lot of calories, especially if we are mixing the alcohol with sweet syrups, additives and other liquors which add additonal calories to our drink. This over time has the potential to induce weight gain.
Increased Risk Of Cancer:
The major consensus among scientific literature is that heavy drinking can definitely promote the development of several different types of cancers, where the National Toxicology Program of the American Department of Health and Human Services actually lists alcohol as a widely used carcinogenic substance.
Alcohol consumption increases our chances of developing the following cancers: Head, throat, oeasophagal cancer, liver, breast and colorectal cancer
Brain & Nervous System Impacts
In terms of our brain, alcohol has very noticeable effects on our cognitive abilities and functioning. Some of these effects include:
Lack of mental clarity: This makes it increasingly harder for you to focus and think straight without getting distracted by other thoughts.
Making it harder to form long term memories: This is explained by alcohol damaging or even killing many vital nerve cells in our brain which are involved with memory such as nerve cells of the hippocampus - A brain region proven to be crucial for the formation of long term memories.
Making rational and safe choices: This is often because repetitive alcohol consumption can damage your brains frontal lobe which is crucial for executive and controlled functions, meaning that you are more likely to not act rationally.
Regulating your emotions: When intoxicated with alcohol, we might feel a pleasant feeling of relaxation but with excessive drinking, alcohol actually disrupts our natural brain chemistry which increases our chances of developing depression and anxiety.
Our general nervous system can be impacted by alcohol just as much as our brain, because alcohol reduces the neural communication between our brain and nervous system in ways that lead to:
A loss of general body coordination
Slurred speech
Feelings of numbness or tingling sensations in your feet (serious damage to nervous system)
Blood Sugar Management Issues
Health experts generally recommend that people who are diabetic or hypoglycemic (suffer with low blood sugar levels) should avoid excessive amounts of drinking.
Consistent drinking can do serious damage to your pancreas as well as liver, which damage your bodies natural release of blood sugar regulating hormones such as insulin and glucagon, which can put you at a higher risk for type II diabetes.
Additionally, excessive drinking is commonly linked to conditions such as pancreatis or liver disease which can make you more prone to hypoglycemia.
Digestive Problms
Although the link between drinking and digestive complications is not immediately clear, there is scientific evidence which shows that heavy drinking damages the internal tissues of your digestive tract which over time mean that your intestines have more difficulty digesting and absorbing nutrients from your food, which puts you at a increased risk for malnutrition.
Apart from that, drinking may cause abdominal problems such as:
Bloating
Gas
Diarrhea
Ulcers or hemorrhoids (Due to dehydration and constipation)
Cardiovascular Complications
Regular intaking of alcohol tends to over time also cause problems for our heart and general cardiovascular system, in the following ways:
Cardiomyopathy: A heart disease in which the walls of the heart chambers become stretched, thickened or stiff.
Arrhythmia: Experiencing irregular heart beats.
Stroke: Results as a lack of blood circulation in our brain such as from a blood clot.
High blood pressure: Experiencing chronically elevated blood pressure levels than what is normal
Heart attack: A condition in which an artery supplying our heart with blood and oxygen becomes blocked, so our heart does not get enough oxygen and glucose for proper functioning
Heart failure: The condition where our heart has a inability to pump adequate blood around our body due to the muscle becoming too weak
Anemia: This is linked with the digestive issue point I mentioned previously, in which we damage the internal lining of our intestines so it makes it harder for us to properly absorb nutrients such as iron which is needed for for the production of adequate red blood cells
Serious Liver Issues
When talking about the detrimental impacts that drinking can have on our body, liver damage is usually one of the primary sources of concern for heavy drinkers. This is because the liver is the bodies main blood filtration unit, where if we often drink a lot, our liver over time becomes damaged from this alcohol processing. This can manifest itself in fatty liver disease, alcoholic hepatitis, fibrosis or the well recognized liver cirrhosis.
DANGERS OF REGULAR ALCHOL CONSUMPTION
One of the main dangers when it comes to alcohol, is the possibility of developing a dependance. If we tend to drink regularly, our tolerance for alcohol increases, meaning that we over time need to drink more in order to feel the same effects, leading us into developing a eventual dependance.
If we do develop a dependence apart from a plethora of health issues, we will also likely be able to observe different emotional and physical withdrawal symptoms.
Some of the symptoms associated with alcoholism include:
Having cravings for alcohol
Drinking more over time
Having difficulty with stopping to drink after one drink
Continuing to drink even when alcohol clearly has a negative impact on your life
Inability to quit drinking
GUIDELINES ON DRINKING
When you do decide to drink on occasion, I would advise you to keep the following in mind:
Don't go drinking if hungry: Always make sure to eat something before or during the time you drink as this prevents you becoming intoxicated too much too fast.
Drink enough water: This applies to before, during and after drinking, where it is recommended to consume a glass of water for every alcoholic drink we consume. This also helps with minimizing any hangover effects the following day.
Don't drink too fast: Make sure to give your body enough time in between drinks to process the ingested alcohol. Your body is able to process about 30ml of alcohol per hour.
Don't mix drinking with other substances: This applies to caffeine, other types of alcohol as well as any form of drug.
Don't drink and drive: Drinking and driving is dangerous and should never be done, because when we drive, our vision and reaction time are severely impacted which can greatly increase our chances of getting into a car crash.
In this article we covered the topic of alcohol, exploring aspects such as the fundamentals of alcohol and how our body metabolizes it, to then delving into the short and long term effects that alcohol has on our body and finishing off with alcoholic dependency and drinking guidelines.
I hope that you have found something of value in todays topic, and that you found it interesting and persuasive enough to make some changes in your own drinking habits if you find that is an area of concern for you.
Thank you for reading :)
