I seriously considered writing this
chapter while drunk. It wouldn’t have been the first one completed while under the influence.
No matter what you may have heard or read about the possible health benefits of certain types
of alcohol (like red wine, for example), the fact remains that you are better off if you never touch a drop of the stuff in
your entire life.
If you don’t drink booze now,
then DON’T START! Yes, there may be some positive affects for your heart with certain alcoholic drinks, but overall
the costs far outweigh the potential benefits. This shit is bad. It is a toxin that can cause cancer, nuke your liver and
shrink your brain. It is high in Calories. It is expensive. It kills motivation to workout and makes you crave high Calorie
food. It is the devil.
And I love it.
Hey, I never said I was perfect. I have to work to keep my drinking at low to moderate levels.
I don’t always succeed.
The Alleged Benefits of
Alcohol Consumption
Moderate alcohol intake might be good for you, but the manner in which the studies that extol the virtues
of it for preventing heart disease do not qualify as concrete proof. The studies are not controlled and randomized, but instead
rely on self-reporting of alcohol intake. What’s more, they lump ex-drinkers (who are usually people who had a drinking
problem in the past) and lifetime non-drinkers in to the same “abstainer” category.
A theoretical controlled study of alcohol intake would randomly assign people to be non-drinkers,
moderate drinkers and heavy drinkers and they would all stay drinking at that same level for many years while under study.
What’s more the researchers who studied the health effects would be “blinded” so they didn’t know
which subjects were abstainers or moderate or heavy drinkers. Making it double blind would be impossible because the subjects
would certainly know if they were in the “heavy drinker” group or not. Placebos can’t make Rosie O’Donnell
look hot.
This all says nothing of the expense
and ethical issues associated with conducting such a study.
According to Mahmoud El-Sayed et al., “Available evidence suggests… moderate alcohol consumption may have favourable
effects on blood coagulation [good] and fibrinolysis [whateverthehell that is – I think it’s good too]; however,
compelling experimental evidence is lacking to endorse this.”1
In short, regarding the question of whether or not alcohol can be good for your heart, the
answer is “maybe.” I won’t get into a dissection of various types of alcohol or ingredients like resveratrol
because there simply isn’t strong evidence that it helps improve health much.
One thing to bear in mind is that following the rest of the advice in this book is going to have
a positive affect on your heart, so any possible benefits your heart gets from drinking may become unnecessary.
Detrimental Health Effects of Alcohol Consumption
Even the studies that promote health benefits
from alcohol report that high intake is bad. It is only moderate intake that can have some beneficial effects. For a man,
moderate is an average of two drinks per day. Also, you can’t “save it up” for the weekend. According to
these studies, it’s got to be just a couple each day.
Alcohol is the most commonly consumed drug among athletic people, and it not only increases risk of injury by doing something
like getting hammered and skiing headfirst into a tree, but it also decreases performance because, according to El-sayed,
it “adversely affects energy supply and impairs the metabolic processes during exercise.” Chronic use also causes
muscle fiber wasting.2
Here’s
more bad news:
- Although moderate intake may be good for your heart, higher intake is shown
to interfere with heart function.3
- According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA),
“Up to 100 percent of heavy drinkers show evidence of fatty liver, an estimated 10 to 35 percent develop
alcoholic hepatitis, and 10 to 20 percent develop cirrhosis.”4
- The NIAAA also
reports that with the more alcohol consumed, the greater the risk of cancers of the upper digestive tract, the liver, breast
and other cancers.5
- A 2008 study by Carol Ann Paul et al. found that even moderate intake of alcohol
caused brain shrinkage.6
I
could go on an on in much more detail, but the evidence is conclusive that high levels of alcohol intake are very harmful
to your health. Even moderate intake can be bad for you. At the very least, it suppresses your dieting and exercise willpower
while adding a bunch of non-nutritious Calories.
I’m a Drinker. Now What?
If you’re a drinker, then feel free to take me out for a beer some time. Also, don't forget to
tell your drinking buddies about this site.
Let’s talk about me again for
a minute. I really like beer. If it wasn’t so full of empty Calories, expensive, and bad for me then I would drink a
lot more than I do. I have to really use my willpower to keep my intake at low to moderate levels.
Most weeks I try to keep beer intake at six bottles. I’d be better off if I drank them one
a day for six days and then take a day off, but that isn’t usually the way I do it. When I buy a six-pack it doesn’t
last long. It is not uncommon for me to put the entire thing away on Saturday and I don’t drink the rest of the week.
Other times I may drink closer to a
dozen, with it usually being about four on Friday, five on Saturday and then three on Sunday. I try very hard not to drink
more than 12 a week and succeed about 90% of the time. At 150 Calories per dozen beer works out to 1,800 Calories, which cause
just over half a pound of fat gain.
All bets
are off during summer and Christmas vacation.
So, for 49 weeks a year I struggle to keep my alcohol intake reasonable and I’ve developed a number of strategies
to do that. I’m not saying these strategies will work for you if you love the stuff [which is mostly a taste thing]
the way I do, but they might:
- I almost never drink Monday to Thursday. While it is true that I
would be better off if I spread my six or twelve beer out over the week, I just can’t seem to do it. I’ve tried
and failed a number of times so I’ve come up with a compromise solution. Saving it up for the weekend is not exactly
recommended from a health perspective, but I’m being honest when I tell you that for me it is better than the alternative.
- This is probably
a futile bit of advice, because if you’re a beer drinker then you’ve got your favorite and nothing I can write
is going to change that. Regardless, I’ll tell you that I always drink a premium, English brown ale (Big Rock Traditional
– if you’re ever in Calgary ask the bartender for a “Trad”); it’s
both bitter and filling. Pounding back more than four or five of them takes effort.
- I delay my drinking. On a Saturday there
might be eight beer sitting in the fridge, but I make myself wait until close to dinner time before I open one, because once
that’s done they start going down.
One
of the things I won’t do is drink non-alcoholic beer. Most guys would rather drink their own piss than have that stuff.
I hope my life insurance representative
isn’t reading this. Those buggers get uptight about alcohol consumption. Still, I’ve kept my alcohol intake between
6 and 12 a week for over a dozen years, so I figure I’m doing okay.
I can’t help but think that this entire chapter makes me look like a giant hypocrite.
If there is a Problem
Here are some clues that you might have a
drinking problem:
- Continuing to drink even though it is causing noticeable health problems
- Drinking having a
negative effect on your finances
- Driving while under the influence
- Putting yourself or others in danger
- Putting your job or education in jeopardy
- Getting annoyed when
others remark about your drinking
- Feeling guilty after drinking
- Scheduling your day around drinking
- Negative impact on personal relationships
- Secret drinking7
If this is you, then you’ve got a problem, dude. You need to
get help.
Here are some websites where you can get it:
Good luck.
Go to the Next Section
Previous Section
*With thanks to Nancy Clark
for providing this website information in Appendix B of Nancy Clark’s Sports Nutrition Guidebook.
Notes
- Mahmoud El-Sayed et al., “Interaction Between Alcohol and Exercise: Physiological and Haematological Implications,”
Sports Medicine, 35 (3), 2005, p. 258.
- Ibid., p. 257.
- J. Fernandez-Sola, et al., “The
Relationship of Alcoholic Cardiomyopathy to Cardiomyopathy,” Annals of Internal Medicine, 120, 1994, p. 529.
- http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa19.htm
- http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa21.htm
- Carol Ann Paul et al., “Association of Alcohol Consumption
With Brain Volume in the Framington Study,” Archives of Neurology, 65 (10), p. 1,363.
- http://www.helpguide.org/mental/alcohol_abuse_alcoholism_signs_effects_treatment.htm
