Alcohol: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Good
Alcohol can help make a special occasion enjoyable, especially if you’re a bit anxious. It can taste great and help people have a good time. But not all the effects of alcohol are good.
Loosens the Reins
Alcohol is a drug that alters perception. In the short term, it relaxes and lifts your mood. It makes you more social, at first. Drinking alcohol loosens the restraint on your behaviour, making your brain less likely to stop you from doing stupid stuff. It also slows down your thinking and interferes with memory and slurs speech. It also makes it difficult to control your muscles and maintain your balance.
Breakin’ it Down
When you have a drink, you feel a bit better, but your blood sugar drops a bit, especially if you have an empty stomach, making you a bit dizzy. Your body thinks of alcohol as a poison and begins trying to break it down and get rid of it. The stomach can’t break it down, so it passes it over to the liver via the bloodstream. It takes 30 to 60 minutes to get peak blood alcohol levels. Drinking with food slows down alcohol absorption, reducing peak level up to 50%.
Getting Rid of It
Once in the bloodstream, some of the alcohol enters the brain. Most substances in the blood can’t enter the brain because of something called the blood-brain barrier, but alcohol is able to travel into the brain, impairing brain function.
Toxic Sickness
The liver breaks down the alcohol into compounds that can be flushed out by the kidneys. The intermediate step in the breakdown of alcohol is a potent toxin that makes people sick and vomit. The breakdown of alcohol is managed by enzymes, and different people have different levels of the enzymes based on genes. Most people can efficiently filter one drink with the enzymes stored in their liver. More than one and the liver gets backlogged and can’t filter it fast enough. Any more than one drink an hour and your blood alcohol level keeps rising. But even one drink can slow your reaction time. Eventually, some of the excess raw alcohol is exhaled in the breath.
It’s a Days Work
Over the next 24 hours, your body tries to rid itself of the alcohol. Because men have more stored water in their body, the alcohol is more diluted, allowing men to process more alcohol.
More Than 4
Alcohol can be addictive. Once a person is drinking a lot, they begin to become addicted. They will experience withdrawal symptoms when they stop drinking. Drinking more than 4 or 5 drinks at a single event is considered binge drinking. Drinking more than 7 drinks a week is also heavy drinking.
The Bad
Heavy alcohol use over years causes liver damage and brain damage. Long-term heavy drinking actually shrinks the brain. Heavy alcohol use is also tied to heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure. There is some research that says light drinking can actually keep your heart healthy, but all research says that heavy drinking causes heart disease. And also with diabetes, one drink, especially wine, with a meal seems to keep blood sugar more stable, but heavy drinking increases your risk of getting diabetes.
Worse
When it comes to cancer, alcohol increases the risk of many cancers. Even light drinking seems to increase mouth and throat cancer. And the more you consume, the higher the risk. And of course, alcohol carries the risk of addiction, especially if you have a family history. And alcohol is a deadly poison. About 1 litre of hard liquor can be deadly.
What a Waist
Also, a glass of wine has a lot of calories, about as many as a full can of coke. Another reason moderation is in order.
The Ugly
Almost ⅓ of road deaths are caused by alcohol. Alcohol is also connected to a lot of violence. About half of people murdered are drunk at the time, and at least half of murderers are drunk. Almost half of sexual assault criminals were impaired by alcohol, and nearly ¾ of college age rape victims were intoxicated. Also, half of domestic abusers had been drinking before the attack.
The Surprising
There is one life-saving use of alcohol. In the case of methanol poisoning, alcohol (ethanol) is used to reduce the absorption of the more poisonous methanol. Alcohol can be an antidote.
The Bread
Alcohol is the product of fermenting sugars. Yeast, which is a living thing, converts the sugar to a carbon dioxide gas and alcohol. Incidentally, that is the same thing yeast does in bread, but with bread, most of the alcohol is cooked off in the oven, with only trace amounts left. Fresh bread really is intoxicating!
The Wine
A shared communion cup, which is used in some churches, seems like a way to spread disease, but given the alcohol content of communion wine, and the anti-bacterial properties of the silver in the cup, the risk of getting an infection is minimal.
Caution
Alcohol has many interactions with other medications. Be sure to ask your health care provider if you can drink while you’re on a specific prescription. With some medicines, alcohol undoes the effects, making them useless. With others, it can be a toxic combination. Never drink alcohol while taking any drugs unless you have checked out the interactions.
The Other
Rubbing alcohol is isopropyl alcohol and/or ethanol with added menthol. It’s used to sanitize cuts on the skin or as camp fuel. Rubbing alcohol was originally used as a massage product, although in a slightly different form, with added herbs. If ethanol is used as its base, it often has deadly menthol added to prevent it from being taxed and used as an alcoholic drink.
Methanol, originally called wood alcohol as it was made from fermenting wood, is also poisonous. A little as a third of an ounce can cause blindness, and more can cause death.
Freedom in Limits
If you find it hard to stop drinking too much, find a support group that can help. Your future self will thank you. Otherwise, enjoy a drink at the right time. Red wine seems to be the best choice. It has some healthy compounds and has the most research showing a health benefit. But keep your drinking very low, then you’ll get the good without the bad or the ugly.
