Boozing is a way of celebration in all kinds of environments. Whether you are at a party, marriage, birthday function, boozing is mandatory. Alcohol or Ethanol (chemistry here) is a slow toxin.
While studies show small amounts of daily consumption are good, but there isn’t any consistent evidence to keep the study legitimate and nobody says that alcohol is overall healthy to our body.
More than 14 million adults ages 18 and older have alcohol use disorder (AUD), and 1 in 10 children live in a home with a parent who has a drinking problem.
In the United States, nearly 88,000 people die per year from alcohol-related causes. Globally, alcohol accounts for 3.3 million deaths- 5.9 percent of all deaths- each year.
Table of contents
Alcohol’s journey through our body
We are going to see the pathway alcohol takes through our bodies as it enters through our mouth. We are going to see the various organs and tissue it interacts with its journey and sees how it affects our body as a whole.
Mouth
The first place the alcohol enters your body will be through your mouth. The lining inside the mouth, tongue, and cheek is mucosal tissue which helps to keep your mouth lubricated and humid. This lining absorbs alcohol which gets absorbed into your bloodstream directly. That’s the reason wine tasters spend a considerable amount of time keeping the wine inside their mouth before spitting it out.
Stomach
The next place is through the windpipe to the esophagus which connects all the way to our stomach. So, the stomach is the first place alcohol is really getting absorbed which is somewhere around 10-15%. If you have food inside your stomach, there is a bunch of stomach acid which is going to be secreted delaying the effect of alcohol into the bloodstream. But some of the alcohol will be absorbed by the lining of the stomach which is the mucosal tissue that then gets into the bloodstream and heads to the liver.
Small Intestine
If your drinking alcohol on an empty stomach, it will directly get into your intestine- less affecting your stomach but will get into your bloodstream quicker through the small intestine. This is where the vast majority of the alcohol absorption is going to happen through mesentery and travel to the liver to be metabolized.
Liver
The largest organ in the body which has the ability to regenerate or heal itself. The alcohol here is going to meet itself with an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase. This enzyme converts (oxidizes) this alcohol into acetaldehyde which is actually more toxic than alcohol and carcinogenic. But wait, the liver has the capability to convert this acetaldehyde to acetate which our body can take care of with no problem.
But this conversion keeps other functions of the liver in que and making the deposition of fatty acids in the liver. This is the reason why heavy drinkers develop fatty livers. The liver can eliminate 0.5 oz of alcohol per hour which is one beer, one glass of wine, or one shot.
The amount of alcohol you consume and the time frame you consume it have a strong influence on the liver's ability to convert it into acetate. So, some of that alcohol is going to your bloodstream making its way to our heart. The heart is going to beat and send that blood into your lungs.
Lung
The alcohol gets absorbed into the lung tissue and gets its way into the air sacs (Alveoli) inside the lungs. The alcohol is going to evaporate inside these air sacs and as you breathe out, alcohol is going to go all the way through your respiratory tract to your breath. This is the reason why a breath analyzer works so efficiently because alcohol is there in your breath. If we think about this, we are actually breathing out alcohol as we drink alcohol!
Heart and nervous system
As the heart beats, the rest of the alcohol is pumped up and is send all the way to our brain. And then, it starts distributing it throughout our body. Basically, alcohol is going to interact with all the parts of our body except for bone tissue and fatty tissue. The reason alcohol doesn’t interact with fatty tissue is that it is made up of lipid and oil where water (alcohol) doesn’t mix well.
Alcohol also stimulates our sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for flight or fight mode. This makes our heart to beat faster pushing the blood even more forcefully to things like muscles. This also causes us to sweat faster making us to smell like alcohol. All this can have an effect on the protein synthesis of our muscle tissue. The alcohol can prevent protein to get build up inside your muscle which eventually nullifies your effect of going to the gym to an extent.
Brain
The alcohol has now entered the bloodstream of our brain. The neurons in our brain talk with each other with the help of neurotransmitters called dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins. By this, we are going to experience euphoria, pleasure but lowered inhibitions, cognitive ability, and reflexes. Lowered inhibitions make us do things that we normally don’t dare to do. We’ll be thinking slower because of lower cognitive ability but we are going to be happier because of the higher experience of euphoria. This is all the effect on the neurological tissue in our brain.
Let’s see how it affects our hormonal tissue. The hypothalamus and pituitary gland control our entire hormonal system. When we are drinking, the hypothalamus is aware of it and it's going to adjust our hormonal system based on that. This basically tells your adrenal gland to secrete cortisol (stress hormone) and adrenaline hormone. This makes us stressed as adrenaline is going through our bodies.
Kidney
This hypothalamus is also going to slow down the secretion of anti-diuretic hormones. Diuretic hormones make you to urinate, so anti-diuretics make you to hold on to the water and this has a very big effect on your kidneys. There are millions of tiny filtration units in our kidney to filter the bloodstream which converts it into the urine.
So, anti-diuretic constricts the blood vessels inside our kidney making less blood volume getting filtered making us less urinate. But we are drinking alcohol making us pee a lot. What this means is we are getting rid of all these fluids and more fluid than we are bringing in than the alcoholic beverage. By this, we are going to lose electrolytes through our kidney making us more dehydrated and losing our ability to rehydrate because electrolytes are the one that attracts water back into our body.
Body fat
Think about a male and a female. Since females have more body fat percentage than males, this making the alcohol more concentrated in her blood volume. This means alcohol can affect females more intensely than males.
After-effects of Alcohol
So, how alcohol is going to interact with our body is based on our genetics, how vascular our organs and structure are, overall health, basic physique. So, how alcohol is going to interact with our bodies is a tough question to answer.
We have mentioned earlier about our liver’s ability to break acetaldehyde. Too much acetaldehyde can cause headaches associated with hangovers. The body getting dehydrated also make our mouth dry, thirst, and dizziness. Some immune cells produce substances called cytokines which cause dizziness, nausea, and fatigue. Alcohol also increases the release of gastric acid in our stomach causing stomach pain. Alcohol can also interfere with our liver's production of glucose which causes dizziness, disorientation and lack of energy.
Sleep
Drinking at night negatively affects our sleep since alcohol inhibits neurotransmitters inside our brains. This ends up dismantling our sleep through the night and disrupting our sleep cycle. Electrical brainwaves show that sleeping while intoxicated is not natural sleep, it is more sedative-like having anesthesia. This also disrupts our REM sleep, the type of sleep which causes us to dream. The aldehydes produced by our liver cause our brainwaves to block this REM sleep which is an essential part of memory and learning.
Aging
Alcohol accelerates the aging process of our body. Alcohol decreases testosterone, lowers GH and thyroid, increases insulin, increases the stress hormone, and creates hormonal imbalance.
Alcohol poisoning
Heavy amount of alcohol drinking can cause alcohol poisoning which can cause loss of consciousness, respiratory depression, coma, or possibly death. Alcohol poisoning can also depress your gag reflex choking on your own vomit which can lead to death.
Long term
Anemia: Low amount of oxygen-carrying red blood cells
Cell death in liver cells and brain cells leading to the organs not functioning properly
The risk of heart failure, high blood pressure, stomach, and intestinal problem also increases
Fact: 85% of adults have drunk alcohol in their life.
Overcoming Hangover: The best course is time. Time will heal the effects of alcohol that has on our bodies.
Drunk Monkey Hypothesis
A gene mutation that happened 10 million years ago in our ancestors who had a specific mutation in their enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase which made this enzyme metabolizing alcohol 40 times more effective. This also meant that no number of lower doses of alcohol became poisonous (possibly kill us) but now can be a viable source of energy. This also meant that our ancestors no longer needed to live on the trees as copious amounts of fermented fruits were accessible on the forest floor to eat. Thus, eating the fruits also meant getting lots of energy during the day.
Effect of Alcohol on our body and mind
Liver
Alcohol can kill our liver cells, leading to scarring in the liver called liver cirrhosis. Long-term effects may give us a fatty liver where it doesn’t function properly as it should.
Heart
It creates clots and high levels of fats leading to high cholesterol in our body. This brings a burden to the heart to pump blood making us prone to heart-related diseases.
Brain
It affects the neurons making the communication in our brain harder. This makes us harder to think, speak, remember things, make decisions, etc. We might also have mental issues like depression and dementia.
Cancer
Alcohol can damage the cells in your mouth, throat, and esophagus. Cancer can happen in our stomach, liver, breast, and small intestine. Alcohol can also accelerate the carcinogens from tobacco.
Infections
Too much alcohol can damage our immune cells from fighting viruses and bacteria. It mainly harms the liver which makes anti-bacterial proteins.
Digestive problems
It causes inflammation in our stomach lining causing ulcers, heartburn, and nausea. This also makes us harder to digest important nutrients like B12 and thiamine. It can also cause pancreatitis which is an inflammation in the pancreas.
Social
Alcoholics are much more likely to get divorced, have problems with domestic violence, struggle with unemployment, live in poverty, problems with personal relationships.
Family
Family members or close friends are obligated to cover up for you with the drinking problem taking the burden of cleaning up our messes, lying for you. Children are more sensitive and can suffer long-lasting emotional trauma when their parent is an alcoholic or heavy drinker.
Self-medicate
People who suffer from mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, or bipolar disorder are more likely to use alcohol to escape their present reality.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines one standard drink as
What happens once we quit drinking?
Alcohol withdrawal
This can happen when we were drinking heavily and all of a sudden reduced the amount or stopped drinking. This can cause behavioral and mental problems. Problems with sleeping, nausea, and vomiting can be the initial signs. Signs of anxiety, restlessness, and seizures can happen on the way. Sometimes symptoms can be severe enough to disrupt our work and cause an imbalance in our work-life situations.
Other effects on our body include:
Our heart starts to pump better lowering the risk of high blood pressure, heart failure, and deposition of fats in our blood vessels.
Our liver starts to heal itself and regenerate. The build-up of fatty tissues in our liver starts to reduce lowering the chances of liver cirrhosis.
We start to get in shape, getting to lose weight and bringing your healthy body back to life.
As carcinogens are being cut from our appetite, the chances of developing cancer-related diseases lower significantly.
We get back our sleep and most importantly REM sleep affecting our ability to dream.
We regain our immunity back to fight dangerous diseases which keeps us healthy for the long run.
Our brain starts to regain abilities to think correctly, speak and get a sense of our motor skills. This clears our mind and will be having a good time to act and do things accordingly.
Our social and personal relationships start to mature, and abuse related to alcohol starts to narrow down. This brings back our focus to work and important activities in our life. Our sexual relationships also start to improve as we spend more time with our loved ones.
Treatments for Alcohol Problems
Researchers show that about one-third of the people who get treated for alcohol-related problems have no further symptoms 1 year later. There are a variety of treatments available but there is no one-fit-magical solution. Each person reacts with the treatment differently so understanding the treatments is an important first step.
Behavioral Treatments
This is aimed to bring a change to the drinking behavior of a person. This is commonly led by health professionals, psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker or a counselor. This includes developing skills to stop drinking, building a strong social connection with the support groups, setting a goal, avoiding triggers.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: This is a one-on-one session with the therapist focusing on the behavioral patterns, feelings and stress which lead to drinking. The aim is to change the thought process behind drinking and to cope with the everyday situations which might trigger us to drink.
Motivational Therapy: The aim is to build and strengthen the motivation to stop drinking. It does by identifying the advantages and disadvantages of drinking and focuses on a plan to build confidence, skills to stop drinking.
Family counseling: This involves spouse and other family members in repairing and building the strength to maintain abstinence (Stop drinking) compared to people with individual counseling.
Support groups: This involves brief sessions with other support groups who want to stop drinking. They can exchange their thought process, and this build up the confidence to make a plan and action.
Medications
All the approved medications are non-addictive and can be used alone or in a combination with other treatments. These have been shown to effectively stop or reduce the consumption of alcohol and avoid relapse.
Different people react with medication differently and there is no certainty that all people will have the effect of medication completely. In the advance of this, personalized medication is on the rise which targets genes and other factors which predict how well the person is going to react to the treatment.
Naltrexone has shown to reduce the craving in some individuals which indirectly reduces their consumption of alcohol in their daily use.
Disulfiram is a drug that punishes people who consume alcohol by making them sick causing nausea, vomiting, headache, etc.
Acamprosate is a novel medication that acts on the neural transmitters in our brain blocking the signal and lowers the high alcohol is making.
Topiramate is an anti-seizure medication that reduces alcohol consumption in some individuals.
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