All you need to know about alcohol consumption

Alcohol is a big piece of overall health. There are so many aspects and everyone is unique in terms of how they can manage alcohol, how it impacts them personally, how much they can consume, and whether they are able to restrain themselves from consuming large amounts. Most often, those who have problems with metabolising alcohol are the ones who need to stay away from liquor.

In this article, we are not looking at how people can become sober, rather, we are looking at alcohol through the lens of what it can impact within the body, and how much should you or can you drink.

What is harmful about alcohol?

When it comes to alcohol, perhaps most people want to be the ostrich. Somewhere deep down they probably know that it can impact the body or worsen their symptoms, but they choose to not look deeper as alcohol can be linked intensely to the social blueprint. You might have heard someone say that alcohol is part of socialising with the community. This is true to an extent. Even in blue zones, people enjoyed alcohol as part of being with the community. However, they always drank in moderation, enjoying a glass of wine a couple of times a week. What is alcohol doing within the body?

1. Alcohol is metabolised as sugar and can have a worse impact than sugar. It is rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream via the stomach and the small intestines. When you drink alcohol, especially on an empty stomach, your blood sugar spikes rapidly. As your body starts to metabolise alcohol, your blood sugar crashes suddenly.

It also prevents your liver from releasing glycogen stores and leaves you with low blood sugar, where you feel jittery. Drinking excess alcohol can also reduce the effectiveness of insulin, making you more insulin resistant. Many people who have several drinks a few times every week can be insulin resistant, have poor blood sugar control, and suffer from fatty liver disease. Your liver must work to remove that alcohol from your blood and depriorotises other functions.

2. Speaking of the liver, when you consume alcohol regularly, your liver is occupied with cleaning up your system from alcohol. Therefore, it starts to impact your hormones. Whether it is a man or a woman, hormones need to stay balanced. Your liver gets occupied in metabolising alcohol. It is unable to metabolise hormones like estrogen, which needs to be used and discarded. This can lead to low progesterone, estrogen dominance, and conditions such as PCOS, fibroids, endometriosis, PMS, and hot flashes.

Women sometimes have detoxifying juices like green smoothies after a night of binge drinking, but this just confuses the body. The impact on physiology occurs during the night of drinking and systems are impacted thereafter. One drink is likely not going to fix it. Hormone dysregulation is also a root cause of depression and poor stress resilience, both of which again triggers the need for alcohol.

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3. As insulin resistance rises gradually, it triggers a spike in fasting blood sugar, leading to prediabetes or type II diabetes. Once your fasting blood sugar reaches 125 and above, it gets much harder to bring it down. This happens because of excess alcohol consumption due to insulin resistance, the inability to balance blood glucose levels, and suboptimal liver function.

Several symptoms and conditions are linked to poor liver health. Most of those can be reversed just by cutting back on alcohol, and allowing the liver to restore and rejuvenate. It can also impact the pancreas as excess alcohol can lead to excess inflammation. This also means that it impacts the immune system as it depresses white blood cell activity and predisposes you towards higher inflammation.

4. Alcohol impacts the mucosal membranes of the digestive tract, triggering gut inflammation, also known as gut hyperpermeability. The gut mucosa is key to systemic inflammation and nutrient absorption. Damage in the gut mucosa is linked to several inflammatory conditions and low levels of key nutrients. Over time, you might realise that even if you consume adequate nutrients or even take supplements, you are still deficient in certain nutrients like iron and B12. Gut inflammation can also leave you with perpetuating symptoms of digestive distress, such as gas, bloating, IBS, heartburn, pain, indigestion, diarrhoea, ulcers and haemorrhoids.

5. Alcohol impacts the circulatory system and the nervous system. It can affect your heart and lungs, leading to high blood pressure. It can also impact the nervous system, leading to tremors, depression, inability to cope with stress, palpitations, poor memory, mood fluctuations, and nervousness. This can spiral you into needing antidepressants, and the combination of alcohol and antidepressants are dangerous, even when they are not mixed.

Are some types of alcohol healthy?

You might have heard that some drinks are healthy. One example of this is drinking red wine to support heart health, or brandy when you have a cold. The truth is that the amount of resveratrol in red wine needed to offer potential benefit would require you to consume a huge quantity of red wine, which would be detrimental in so many ways. It is just not possible to drink the recommended therapeutic dose from alcohol.

Having a brandy to prevent an oncoming cold is not true either. It can only depress the immune system, predisposing you to having a cold or the virus to get worse or stronger.

How much intake is not harmful?

How much alcohol is safe? Well, this really depends on the condition of your body. If you are struggling with insulin resistance, prediabetes, hormonal imbalance, poor blood sugar control, poor sleep, depression, anxiety, and fatty liver, you probably need to stay minimal. The other aspect to consider is whether you have control. If you talk about stopping it anytime to people, and really cannot stay without a drink when you socialise, you may be controlled by it. You might need to plan a conscious way to reduce it, by deciding when you will drink and when you will not.

Follow some guidelines to help you stay on track:

• Women react more adversely to alcohol, and have poor control during their luteal phase, which is the time before a menstrual cycle. Consume no more than one drink a couple of times a week. This is more so if you have fibroids, PMS, mood fluctuation, and PCOS.

• Never drink on an empty stomach, and that wine and cheese is the worst combination. Having alcohol on an empty stomach is setting yourself up for blood sugar fluctuations and insulin resistance.

• Always have alcohol with a wholesome meal that includes carbohydrates and proteins, so your blood sugar is balanced. Sip them slowly and make them last, so that you control alcohol, and not the other way around.

• Beer is light alcohol but triggers estrogen dominance. If you have estrogen dominance and related conditions, it can make it worse. Stay with a clean red wine.

• If you have challenges with histamine, such as urticaria, red wine will make it substantially worse. Men should stay with two drinks a night, a few times a week. If this feels too much for you right now, just begin with a plan to commit to a few nights a week with no alcohol. Wherever you begin is a good place to.

Ultimately, it may not be about sobriety, but you can easily be over drinking without being addicted. This means that you are unable to taper or stop but convince yourself that you are not addicted. The truth is that this is a big part of your health.