Alcohol and Health: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Many people facing anxiety and depression drink intentionally to reduce stress and improve mood. While drinking may provide a few hours of relief, it may worsen your overall mental health and spark a vicious cycle (23, 24). While alcohol intake and depression seem to increase the risk of one another simultaneously, alcohol abuse may be the stronger causal factor (20, 21, 22). Conversely, drinking moderately has been linked to a reduced risk of dementia — especially in older adults (16, 17, 18).

Your liver’s role

This is particularly true for those in social environments with high visibility and societal influence, nationally and internationally, where alcohol frequently accompanies socializing. In this context, it is easy to overlook or discount the health and social damage caused or contributed to by drinking. Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, including the most common cancer types, such as bowel cancer and female breast cancer. Ethanol (alcohol) causes cancer through biological mechanisms as the compound breaks down in the body, which means that any beverage containing alcohol, regardless of its price and quality, poses a risk of developing cancer. Newer research is finding similar associations with moderate levels of drinking. In a forthcoming paper, posted to BioRXiv, researchers took a similar approach to tease out the risks of drinking — using moderate drinkers instead of non-drinkers as the reference point to circumvent the “sick quitter” problem once again.

Long-term alcohol use can change your brain’s wiring in much more significant ways. When you drink too much alcohol, it can throw off the balance of good and bad bacteria in your gut. That allows excess calories from the foods you eat to sit around, leading to weight gain. That’s because your body already has processes in place that allow it to store excess proteins, carbohydrates and fats. So, your system prioritizes getting rid of alcohol before it can turn its attention to its other work. For more information about alcohol’s effects on the body, please visit the Interactive Body feature on NIAAA’s College Drinking Prevention website.

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1. However, when it comes to heavy drinking and binge drinking, your risk rises (53, 54, 55, 56).
2. For more information about alcohol’s effects on the body, please visit the Interactive Body feature on NIAAA’s College Drinking Prevention website.
3. In heavy drinkers, binge drinking may cause your liver to become inflamed.
4. “The good news is that earlier stages of steatotic liver disease are usually completely reversible in about four to six weeks if you abstain from drinking alcohol,” Dr. Sengupta assures.
5. That’s been the message — from researchers, governments, and beverage companies — for decades.

Each of those consequences can cause turmoil that can negatively affect your long-term emotional health. The morning after a night of over-imbibing can cause some temporary effects on your brain. Things like trouble concentration, slow reflexes and sensitivity to bright lights and loud sounds are standard signs of a hangover, and evidence of alcohol’s effects on your brain.

Deciding about drinking

Many different subtypes of alcohol dependence exist, characterized by alcohol cravings, inability to abstain or loss of self-control when drinking (71). Alcohol dependence is one of the main causes of alcohol abuse and disability in the US and a strong risk factor for various diseases (70). Some people become addicted to the effects of alcohol, a condition known as alcohol dependence or alcoholism. As a result, drinking alcohol with meals may cut the rise in blood sugar by 16–37% more than water. Blood sugar between meals — known as fasting blood glucose — may also decline (51, 52).

With continued alcohol use, steatotic liver disease can lead to liver fibrosis. Eventually, you can develop permanent and irreversible scarring in your liver, which is called cirrhosis. The Global status report on alcohol and health and treatment of substance use disorders presents a comprehensive overview of alcohol consumption, alcohol-related… Red wine may be one of the healthiest alcoholic beverages, probably due to its high concentration of antioxidants. Alcohol consumption is a risk factor for cancers of the mouth, throat, colon, breast and liver (57, 58, 59). Characterized by abnormally high blood sugar, type 2 diabetes is caused by a reduced uptake of glucose, or blood sugar, by your cells — a phenomenon known as insulin resistance.

Weighing in on weight gain from antidepressants

In observational trials, it also appears to lower the risk of diabetes. We need more high-quality evidence to assess the health impacts of moderate alcohol consumption. And we need the media to treat the subject with the nuance it requires. Yet we continue to see reductive narratives, in the media and even in science journals, that alcohol in any amount is dangerous.

Knowing your personal risk based on your habits can help you make the best decision for you. If you drink every day, or almost every day, you might notice that you fun substance abuse group activities for adults catch colds, flu or other illnesses more frequently than people who don’t drink. That’s because alcohol can weaken your immune system, slow healing and make your body more susceptible to infection. Your body breaks alcohol down into a chemical called acetaldehyde, which damages your DNA.

This idea was known as the “French paradox” — the observation that the French drank lots of wine, and despite eating a diet rich in saturated fat, had lower rates solution based treatment of cardiovascular disease. In April, a big meta-study involving 600,000 participants, published in April in the Lancet, suggested that levels of alcohol previously thought to be relatively harmless are linked with an earlier death. What’s more, drinking small amounts of alcohol may not carry all the long-touted protective effects on the cardiovascular system.

In the EU, cancer is the leading cause of death – with a steadily increasing incidence rate – and the majority of all alcohol-attributable deaths are due to different types of cancers. In long-term observational studies comparing drinkers and non-drinkers, light to moderate drinkers (who imbibed about one to two units of alcohol a day) often had better health outcomes compared to non-drinkers and heavy drinkers. They had lower rates of heart disease and heart attacks and lived longer. Moderate drinkers also had lower rates of diabetes, another important risk factor for heart disease (although this result is less definitive).

During pregnancy, drinking may cause the unborn baby to have brain damage and other problems. For example, it may be used to define the risk of illness or injury based on the number of drinks a person has in a week. Even drinking mirtazapine and alcohol a little too much (binge drinking) on occasion can set off a chain reaction that affects your well-being. Lowered inhibitions can lead to poor choices with lasting repercussions — like the end of a relationship, an accident or legal woes.

Medicine and public health would benefit greatly if better data were available to offer more conclusive guidance about alcohol. To date, federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health have shown no interest in exclusively funding these studies on alcohol. As these examples illustrate, drinking alcohol may raise the risk of some conditions but not others. Patients should work with their clinicians to understand their personal risks and make informed decisions about drinking. Alcohol consumption contributes to 2.6 million deaths each year globally as well as to the disabilities and poor health of millions of people.