How about you post a peer reviewed medical journal article supporting your irresponsible encouragement to drink a lot first? You may mean your posts as a drinker’s bravado as a joke, but this one sure doesn’t read that way. Ethanol is a toxin and it has no health benefits at all. Consistent usage will shorten your life and the quality of it. Karl Gauss’s post sums it up well. Enjoy alcohol in moderation. A bottle a day isn’t moderate, despite knowing of a few people who enjoyed way too much into their 90s. For every drunk living into their 90s, you can find dozens who died of a variety of very painful conditions related to alcohol in their 40s to 60s. A few champion drunks have managed to die of liver failure in their 20s.
I’m more interested in how much red wine I need to drink to turn this web site into a blog.
For that you’d need more of a rose`.
An excellent challenge. We’ll create a double blind study with a control group. And then another group will be encouraged to do something which might seriously harm them and shorten their life. Why didn’t anyone think of this before?!
YOLO!
The CDC has lots of cites. More than one drink a day for women or more than 2 drinks a day for men is associated with unintentional injuries and, well, violence over the short run and a host of problems over the long run. Long run problems include: [ul][li]Neurological problems, including dementia, stroke and neuropathy.14, 15[/li][li]Cardiovascular problems, including myocardial infarction, cardiomyopathy, atrial fibrillation and hypertension.16 [/li][li]Cancer of the mouth, throat, esophagus, liver, colon, and breast.2 [/li][li]Liver diseases, including—[/li] [INDENT]Alcoholic hepatitis.
Cirrhosis, which is among the 15 leading causes of all deaths in the United States.21
Among persons with Hepatitis C virus, worsening of liver function and interference with medications used to treat this condition.22
[*]Other gastrointestinal problems, including pancreatitis and gastritis.23, 24[/ul] [/INDENT] The link has peer reviewed citations. http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm
Yep. Just finishing off this glass before bed.
It’s like that old saying: “Live fast, die young and leave a ravaged corpse.”
I’ve been drinking everyday for 14 years after I stopped boxing. I have been drinking red wine a bottle a day (sometimes 2 bottles on a friday or saturday) and I just had a liver function test, everything came back normal. I’m 36 and everyone still says I don’t look older than 30, I do exercise 3 times a week being i the army and I take a very hot bath 3-5 times a week to relax and detox. I believe red wine is the only alcoholic drink that people should drink due to its anti-oxidants and other health benefits. If you think you are relatively healthy then keep drinking it. If your body is showing you signs of bad health then go and get yourself checked out. For me, if you take a look at who lives the longest on the planet it is the Mediterraneans… the people who drink a fair bit of red wine.
Anecdotes are nice, but they don’t prove a thing. Sure my brother-in-law’s uncle’s cousin is 94 years old, drinks a half gallon of whiskey for breakfast every day, smokes 4 packs of Lucky nons, and has unprotected sex with inner city prostitutes every night at 10pm, and he’s doing JUST fine, but that doesn’t mean that everyone else or even a small fraction of others can do it. One must look at the overall statistics.
And yes, some studies show that moderate alcohol consumption leads to positive health benefits. Has it ever been shown that it was the alcohol that promotes that, or could it simply be that a person who can have 1 glass of wine per day is more likely the type of person who takes all things in moderation and therefore leads a healthy lifestyle? I don’t think that connection has been made.
The consistency of doing it every night is not good for your liver, as drinking day in and day out puts considerable stress on your liver and other organs. Perhaps you could drink every other day or every third day. The liver and other organs can take so much damage, but once they reach a certain point where they have been damaged, it is not a pretty picture to regain health. You sound intelligent, so I would cut back or stop drinking while you are ahead.
Almost 4 months later, I ask, “350 *units *per week? What’s a *unit *of alcohol?”
The main point of the use of units of alcohol is that it emphasizes that beer, wine, and spirits can be equally destructive to the liver (and other parts of the body). Some people think that if they, say, drink only beer and no “hard stuff” that they will be immune to the potentially pernicious effects of alcohol.
That’s true insofar as there is only so much time available for drinking. If I spend six hours drinking Bud Light then I will naturally consume less alcohol than spending six hours drinking 151 proof straight whiskey.
Holy crap. 50 units a day is (maths)… like 25 pints of beer a day!
On examining that Wiki link (above) on units of alcohol, I think it’s too confusing and obscures the point. So, here’s my take:
One 10 oz bottle of beer (5% alcohol) contains about 15 gm of pure alcohol
One 4 oz glass of wine, a typical serving at a restaurant (12% alcohol) contains about 15 gm of pure alcohol
One 1 1/4 oz, “shot” of spirits, a typical restaurant serving, (40% alcohol) contains about 15 gm of pure alcohol
In other words, in terms of their alcohol content, one bottle of beer, one glass of wine, and one shot of spirits, all contain about the same amount - around 15 grams of alcohol (i.e. about half an ounce of pure alcohol)
And, when you note that 1 alcohol unit equals 10 gm of alcohol, the drinks above each are about 1.5 units.
It is also important to remember that the drinks people pour at home, or for themselves and their friends generally, are almost always more generous than those above. So, for example, one shot of Scotch at home is likely to contain more than 1.5 units of alcohol.
- Calculations:
10 ounces beer = 300 gm of beer that is 5% alcohol contains 300 X 0.05 = 15 gm of pure alcohol
4 ounces of wine = 120 gm of wine that is 12% alcohol contains 120 X 0.12 = 14.4 gm of pure alcohol
1 1/4 oz of spirits = 37.5 gm of spirits that are 40% alcohol contains 37.5 X 0.40 = 15 gm of pure alcohol
All right, I’m about to hijack this thread if I can. Could we reduce the incidence of liver disease and death from the subsequent complications by fortifying alcoholic beverages with glutathione or glutathione precursors? And if we could, should we?
British researchers just published a study of James Bond’s alcohol consumption and placed it at an average of 92 units per week. The linked article calls that equivalent to either 30+ pints of beer or 10+ bottles of wine. They suggested that regular consumption at this level would likely lead to liver disease and an early death.
I don’t really care for James Bond — or most British Icons — but perhaps the sort of people who airbrush out Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s cigars, and FDR’s cigarettes, could retrofit 007 with no smoking, one small shandy per week, a Volkswagon Hatchback and set the action in local community education centres instead of international casinos.
Note that this is 1 or 2 drinks a day on average. So, save up for the weekends! (But don’t save up for a whole month and then blow your quota in one sitting…That would be binge drinking, which the article proscribes.)