Alcohol, how to drink and stay healthy

Dr. Robert Linn of the United States National Research Foundation has some surprising answers to questions about alcohol and its effects.

Q : How much alcohol can the average person safely drink per day?
A : "Safely" depends on your own individual situation: how old you are, how much you weigh, what kind of health you are in, how you happen to interact with alcohol. But there is no evidence that the amount of alcohol in two medium sized drinks a day can do lasting harm to average person in good health.

Q : What's the biggest single risk you run by drinking?
A : The major risk is probably that you might get drunk and wind up in a car accident. Although excessive drinking over a long period of time can cause liver damage and behavioural breakdowns, there is no evidence at all that moderate drinking is a health hazard.

Q : So why are alcoholics vulnerable to so many different conditions and diseases?
A : An excess of anything you eat or drink is bad for you, and alcoholism isn't any different. The danger of drinking alcohol in excessive amounts is that it has a great many indirect effects.

Some form of malnutrition is very common among people who drink heavily. There are two reasons. First, alcohol, in excessive amounts, dulls the appetite, which means that people tend to drink their meals instead of eating them. Second, alcohol provides calories that have no nutrient content. And if you don't make up for this loss of nutrients in some way, you're almost bound to develop deficiencies.

Q : Should you cut down on your drinking when you reach your fifties and sixties?

A : Certainly, if you're a fairly heavy drinker and I'm talking now about four or five drinks a day your body is going to have tougher time dealing with that amounts as you age.
But when it comes to moderate social drinking, age isn't as much of a factor as general health. As long as you're feeling will and have your weight under control, there's no reason t cut out drinking simply because you're getting older.

Q : What exactly is cirrhosis of liver, and why is it so frequently associated with drinking?
A : Cirrhosis of the liver is very a very serious condition that occurs when scar tissue develops and cuts off the blood supply to the areas responsible for producing and storing nutrients. The scar tissue develops after changes in the fat content of the liver destroy live cells. Liver enzymes, when they are breaking down alcohol, proudce fat which tends to accumulate and eventually filter into the bloodstream.
In small amounts, these excess fat blobules in the blood aren't very dangerous, and may even be healthy, since they appear to limit cholesterol, But when too many accumulate in the liver, they start to interfere with normal liver function.
The disease is commonly associated with alcoholics, but you don't have to be an alcoholic to get cirrhosis of the liver. Prisoners of war have developed it, persumably as a result of malnutrition. The big debate today is whether alcohol is the direct cause of cirrhosis, or whether it's the malnutrition that heavy drinking often produces that really causes the disease. Most researchers have leaned to the malnutrition theory, but recent evidence shows that even with a healthy diet, heavy drinking can produce liver damage.

Q : How can you tell if your drinking is having a bad effect on your liver?
A : The most common symptom of liver malfunction, although it could mean other things as well, is a general feeling of fatigue and weakness. The only way to find out for certain is to have blood test that will show if alcohol is upsetting liver function. One of the early signs of toruble is a rise in the number of fat cells in the liver. Most people who drink heavily develop a fatty liver, but not everybody who develops a fatty liver develops more serious problems. Why some people are more susceptible than others is something we don't know as yet.

Q : When does the "heavy social drinker" become an alcoholic?
A : It depends on how you define the term "alcoholic". The criterion I use is based on the idea of compulsion. As long as the amount of alcohol you're drinking isn't interfering in any way with your health, your family relationships, or your job, and as long as you don't fell the compulsion to drink, you probably don't have a drinking problem. But, if you continue to drink, you probably don't feel the compulsion to continue to drink quite heavily day in and day out, it could easily happen. You, too could become an alcoholic.

Q : Are certain drinks better for you than others?
A : From a purely nutritional point of view, you're better off drinking beer or even wine that you are drinking the hard stuff whiskey, brandy, rum, since there are a number of nutrients in beer, and some minerals in wine.

Q : Why is it a bad idea to mix different kinds of alcoholic drinks?
A : Mixing drinks isn't as bad and idea as some people would lead you to believe. But just like mixing certain foods, mixing certain kind of drinks can upset your stomach and give you a headache. It has noting to do with the alcohol content. Alcohol is alcohol whether in beer, wine, scotch or gin. But the other stuff in some drinks doesn't mix very well.
Probably the worst thing is to go from straight distilled spirits to those exotic cocktail monsters filled with sugar and fruit juice. Beet, though, isn;t bad as a mixer. It actually helps to settle an unsettled stomach - provided the stomach isn't so upset that anything you put in will spell trouble.

Q : Is it OK to have a drink or two if you're having trouble falling asleep?
A : If you're too keyed up or tense to fall asleep, a glass or two of wine or a shot of vodka will do as good a job of putting you to asleep it interfers with the part of sleep known as REM, or dreaming sleep. Your body will try to make up for lost REM sleep once the effect of the booze wears off. So you'll do a lot of tossing and turning, and won't wake up terribly refreshed. And chronic drinking, of course, is murder on your sleeping habits.

Q : Is brandy a good thing to drink on a cold night?
A : Definitely - as long as you're sitting in front of a warm fire. Otherwise, forget the notion that alcohol "warms you up". It actually has the opposite effect. The body's reaction to cold weather, without alcohol, is to direct the flow of blood from the limbs into the trunk and in that way protect the vital organs with warmth. Well, alcohol happens to be a vaso-dilater: it widens the openings of the blood vessels, and worse, makes the blood flow towards the skin's surface.

Q : What's the best way to sober somebody up quickly?
A : There is no best way other than keeping the drinker from drinking any more booze. Time: that's what sobers people up. Time allows the liver to burn up the alcohol that's in the blood, so that the blood alcohol level gets down below the intoxixation level.

Q : But isn't black coffee often recommended for somebody who has had a lot to drink?
A : Coffee is a stimulant. It wakes you up. But there is a difference between being awake and being sober. Coffee counteracts just one of the many intoxicating effects of alcohol-fatigue. It might even be dangerous to give coffee to somebody who has been drinking heavily, if he is going to drive. The coffee may wake him up enough to convince him that he's fit to drive, when actually his judgement and reflexes are such that he shouldn't be behind the wheel.

Q : Is there anyting a person can do to increase his or her alcohol capacity?
A : Unfortunately, the most effective way to increase your alcohol capacity is also the most dangerous. You simply drink more. Heavier drinkers, as a group, hold their alcohol "better" than occassional drinkers. The body apparently adapts to the added onslaught of alcohol.
ON a more practical level, the best way to slow down the effect that alcohol has on you is to make sure you eat when you're drinking, particularly foods rich in protein and fat.

Q : Is it true that drinking makes you forgetful?
A : It's true. Even very modest amounts of alcohol have been shown in laboratory experiments to affect th short-term memory of otherwise normal subjects, and some chronic alcoholics develop a terrible kind of amnesia due to a vitamin B1 deficiency. Of course, one of the particular effects of alcohol in moderate amounts is that it takes the edge off your worries, makee you forget things that you have trouble forgetting when you're sober.

Q : How long does the typical hangover last?
A : There is no such thing as a "typical" hangover. It all depends on the conditions that brought on the hangover; how much you drink; what you drank what you did while you were drinking; what you ate while you drank; and even how guilty you might feel about drinking. But forgetting these individual factors, a typical hangover, as long as you don't compound the misery by drinking more or further irritating your stomach, should clear up beteeen five and ten hours after you wake up.

Q : What's the best hangover remedy?
A : There has yet to be any one drink, pill, or method that has been scientifically proved to be an effective remedy. The problem is that a hangover isn't just one condition. It's a whole series of reactions - headache, upset stomach, thirst, dizziness, fatigue. Probably the best ting you can do for a hangover is nothing - except to take it easy, drink lots of water and let time do the job.