Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 57 - Just How Harmful Is Alcohol?

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

In this episode, Danny talks about the various ways alcohol consumption impacts the body. Many different avenues of impact are discussed, including:The impact of alcohol on different organs/organ systems.The impact of alcohol on fat loss.The societal consensus of alcohol compared to things like sugar.---Thanks For Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING: I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE! Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Follow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!Support the Show.

Hey guys, welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogues podcast. I am your host, Danny Matranga. And today I want to chat a little bit about alcohol consumption. Over the last couple days, I've taken a look at a variety of different meta-analyses. I've talked to clients many times across eight years of coaching. I've perused as much of the research as I could find to just see in what ways, beyond what we kind of conventionally know about alcohol, in what ways does alcohol truly impact our health and longevity? You see, I'm not a big fan of demonizing anything, and that might even be to a fault. At many times in my career, I've defended the non-addictive properties of sugar and stated

that I don't believe that sugar is inherently addictive. And while I still stand by that claim, I want to make it clear. I think part of the reason I vehemently, I don't want to say defend, but vehemently fight against the demonization of foods is because I see the glorification of alcohol. I've always been exceptionally frustrated with how normalized alcohol is in our culture, knowing that it does have largely negative implications on people who abuse it, and those implications extend to the familial level. Of all drugs, if we do classify alcohol as a drug, which we should, alcohol is far and away the most damaging drug societally, but we don't really talk about it much because we see it on TV. It appears

completely normal. In the same way, we see things like fast food on TV or sugar on TV, and we just normalize, hey, this stuff is normal. It's what everybody's doing. But interestingly, when I think things come around to, you know, dissecting this stuff from a nutritional standpoint and a performance standpoint. Sugar, fast food, processed foods, they get the bad rap they likely deserve, but alcohol largely remains kind of off the hook. And so, again, this is food for thought. Please don't take this as a personal attack or me casting judgment on you because perhaps you drink, perhaps you drink a lot. I myself do not drink much, if ever, maybe two to three times a year max, never to excess, but I do enjoy cannabis, which has mind-altering and physiologically altering effects all the same and can be abused in the same way alcohol can. I tend to think of

myself as somebody who is a user rather than an abuser, but at the same way alcohol can. I tend to think of myself as somebody who is a user rather than an abuser, but at the same time, I don't want to stand here and act as though I'm holier than thou. There are certainly things that I enjoy too. But let's do a brief little rundown of exactly in what ways alcohol affects the body. So let's start with the digestive system. Drinking too much alcohol has been shown to have dysregulating impact on digestive enzyme production, particularly in the pancreas. For those of you who are not aware, the pancreas actually plays a really vital role in assisting our digestive processes. The pancreatic juices, as they're often referred to, play a big role in digesting a variety of compounds traditionally found in our diet.

And then the gallbladder, which is responsible for making something called bile, which particularly helps with the digestion of fat, is actually parked right next to the pancreas. And because the pancreas is heavily impacted by excessive alcohol consumption, particularly pancreatitis or inflammation of the pancreas, we see this a lot, alcohol will increase production of these pancreatic enzymes. And these enzymes create that pancreatitis or that inflammation buildup. And these can actually lead to long-term complications. So this is just one example. And again, before I dive into this, guys, this is all in the context of living the healthiest life possible.

And you can drink and live a very healthful life. I just want to help you determine where best to draw that line. At what point do you say enough is enough? Maybe it's one drink, maybe it's two drinks, maybe you don't change your habit at all, maybe you forfeit drinking altogether. But again, there are so many podcasts that have hammered sugar, so many that have hammered fast food, and I just continue to see, for whatever reason, alcohol getting off the hook for being a compound that does in many ways impact long-term health. So another issue when we look at organ systems with regards to excessive alcohol consumption is of course the liver. The liver is responsible for doing a lot of the

detoxification in our body and alcohol use interferes with the liver's ability to break down and remove harmful substances. Chronic liver inflammation and diseases of the liver, these are not uncommon. Excessive alcohol consumption can actually damage the liver to the point where it begins to scar, and this is known as cirrhosis, which may be one of, if not the singular most common form of liver problems. My grandmother actually died of cirrhosis of the liver, and she was somebody who drank effectively to excess most of her life, and she died in her mid-70s, of something that was largely preventable. Now, when that scar tissue forms, it actually begins to destroy the liver, and the body becomes, you know, heavily impacted because all of those substances that the liver does a job of removing,

particularly the toxins, your body just simply can't do it that well. Again, going back to the pancreas, it's quite interesting, but the pancreas is responsible for the production of insulin in response to glucose or elevated blood sugar. And when that pancreatitis kicks in or we have inflammation or we're just stressing the pancreas with too high of an alcohol intake, we can experience hyperglycemia or too much blood sugar. So that can be a problem. As far as the brain and nervous system go, we should have a pretty decent understanding of how alcohol impacts those things anecdotally. We don't even really have to look at the research at all. Anytime you've ever had a drink or drank to

the point where you got buzzed, you've actually experienced alcohol's impact on the nervous system. Alcohol can reduce our ability to communicate from the brain to the body, which is what makes certain tasks like field sobriety tests so difficult. Once you've been drinking, it really impacts the cerebellum, which is the center of our brain responsible for balance. For those of you guys who ever want to remember that, one of the things I learned in my college anatomy course that really stuck with me is cerebellum. When you think of a bell and you think of a bell swinging back and forth, think about that when you remember balance, right? That balance, that swing, and hopefully you won't

forget it. So, alcohol can damage the central nervous system. This isn't too much of a surprise at all. Again, I could list the members of my family who have been impacted by this, by alcohol, but another common alcohol-related issue is something called Wernicke-Korsakov syndrome, which is a brain disorder that can affect motor patterns, it can affect speech, it can affect vision, it can affect a lot of things, and it is something that is almost exclusively seen in people who drink to excess. It's something that I'm relatively familiar with. But again, these are things that I've seen in my personal life in ways that alcohol impacts the central nervous system. So we needn't get into alcohol dependency. I think that that goes without saying. Alcoholism

is rampant, especially here in the United States. Estimates range from 15 to 30 million Americans suffer from alcoholic tendencies or alcoholism, and over 65 million Americans each week engage in binge drinking, which is also in many ways something that I think you could lump in with having a relatively negative impact on your health. As far as alcohol's ability to impact the heart and lungs, we do know that people who are chronic drinkers have a higher risk of heart issues than people who do not drink. If this is exclusively tied to the alcohol, I don't know if we can say that for sure, but we do know that alcohol impairs sleep, it can elevate stress levels in the body, and it generally leads to us making more poor decision-making with regards to nutrition. And I think this is a nice

segue away from kind of the nuts and bolts of how alcohol affects the body, given that we've gone over basically every single system except for the immune system and the reproductive system. We know that alcohol ingestion reduces our immune system's ability to fight off viruses and other things. Even the CDC has gone so far as to say you should limit your alcohol consumption during this pandemic. And I think that that's kind of, again, something that should be relatively obvious. There's so many pundits in the fitness space just absolutely

hammering sugar, don't eat sugar, don't eat junk, don't eat processed foods. Why are we not talking about this? Why are we talking about vaccines when we could be talking about changing our diets? It's like, yeah, no shit. Eating like crap doesn't help. Is anybody going to bring up the fact that we probably should stop culturally drinking to excess? I mean, since COVID, binge drinking has skyrocketed. Alcohol sales have skyrocketed because people have nothing better to do than sit at home and drink. And so alcohol, in almost every sensible thing, in every imaginable way, I should say, negatively impacts your body. On almost every level of every system in your body, on almost every organ, alcohol can have a destructive impact. Where you draw that line is on, I guess you could say,

what level or what intake does alcohol have negative implications for you? And that might be hard to say, but you have to look at the systemic physiological picture and know that there's really no amount of alcohol that provides positive physiological responses for almost every tissue in your body. And that just covers the nuts and bolts. Like I said, moving into the behavioral stuff, I've trained a lot of people over my eight years in the industry. And I live in Sonoma County, which is, if ever there was a place we could highlight as normalizing alcohol consumption in the world,

it's probably right here in my backyard. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast. And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. Sonoma County is the wine capital of the United States. It might even be the wine capital of the world. And people come here all the time to taste the amazing wine that comes from the grapes that

grow in this fantastic soil we have. We live in a place that is highly conducive for producing grapes, which of course are required to make wine. And many of my clients drink one to two glasses of wine every single night. And hey, I can understand how that could become normalized, but here's where it shows up as being a little bit of an issue with regards to behavior. So for some people, two drinks is quite a bit. But if you drink two drinks every night, or you split a bottle of wine every night with your spouse, when you go out or you go to a social event or you go to a 4th of July barbecue, two drinks is the norm. So if you're going to be drinking all day, you're going to certainly drink more than two. And so one of the things I've seen is, you know, many of my

clients drinking two drinks a night and then going on to drink six, seven, eight drinks a day over the weekend if they're socializing. And those calories can really add up. This goes beyond alcohol and its unique chemical impact on the tissues in the body. Let's talk about alcohol from an energy standpoint. Alcohol has seven calories per gram, and most alcohol contains quite a bit of carbohydrate, particularly wine and darker beers. And so if you're going to have a small glass of wine, you're looking at anywhere from 130 to 100 to 130 calories. Two of those a night is 260 calories about per day added. That's quite a bit. That would be the equivalent of adding, say, one snicker bar per day to your diet. A

snicker bar, according to a Google search, has about 230 calories. So two glasses of wine is going to have, on average, right around or a little bit more. And if your client came to you and said, hey man, I'm having a tough time losing fat, and you're like, well, can we look at some of the areas where calories are sneaking into your diet and not providing you with a whole hell of a lot of nutrition. And somebody could say, well, I'm drinking two glasses of wine a night. And another person might say, well, I'm having a Snickers bar every night. And calorically, they're about the same. But here's something interesting that I've noticed. When I tell clients, and this is not really in how I tell them, it's just the generalized response. When I tell clients,

well, hey, we should probably dial back that alcohol intake. It is alarming how many people say, oh, no, no, I can't give up my drinking. I can't give up my glass of wine. And I'm not going to say that makes you an alcoholic, but if you can't give something up, it clearly has a grip on your life and a grip on your routine. What is interesting is when a client says, oh, well, I have a cookie or a Snickers bar every night. And you say, well, knock that off. You know you shouldn't be having that. It doesn't give you a whole lot of nutrition. You don't need the energy that late at night that it provides. And you know that it's, from a hyper-palatability standpoint, one of those foods you're going to eat and not even feel full might even make you more-palatability standpoint, one of those foods you're going to

eat and not even feel full, might even make you more hungry. And they go, oh, you're so right, I know, I need to cut that out. And I just think it's very interesting because, again, that comes back to the societal and cultural understanding and representation of alcohol. We have normalized having two drinks a day during the week. It's not uncommon for couples to split a bottle of wine or for a guy to come home and crack open several beers, even shit, six, seven, eight beers out on the golf course or six, seven, eight beers across a day of watching football. And if you can fit that into your lifestyle and you're not worried about how it impacts your body composition and you're not worried about how it impacts your various organ systems,

that's completely fine. That's nobody's business but your own. I don't think anybody should be able to tell you how much of anything you should put into your body. However, with regards to your fitness, performance, and body composition, drinking at almost any level is not going to help. And at first, we would look at, hey, those couple glasses of wine, those are going to add in some calories, and they're not going to impart a whole hell of a lot of nutrition. But there's a deeper layer here, and it's how alcohol impacts your body and your health directly and indirectly. And so far, we've covered everything in the category of direct. We've looked at how alcohol directly impacts different organ systems. We've also taken

a look at how alcohol directly impacts lean body mass or body weight or body fatness by just taking a cut and dry look at about how many calories in overall prevalency with alcohol consumption. With regards to alcohol consumption, I should say. Per the CDC, the average American gets about 16% of their daily calories from added sugar, which impart no nutritional benefit. Interestingly enough, on a given day, the CDC also reports that people who do drink also consume about 16% of their total daily calorie intake from alcohol. So if you are the average individual who drinks both alcohol and eats quite a bit of sugar, on average, you're going to get the same caloric impact from each. On average, about 16% of your daily calories are going to come from booze, they're going to come from sugar. Let's just say that's the average American. And

again, do what you want. It's from the CDC. If you like them, don't like them, don't hate on me. But when people want to lose weight, they always go straight to the sugar and they go, hey, I'm going to cut out all sugar. And it's like, okay, go ahead, cut out all sugar. And you'll definitely lose weight, no doubt about it. That would be a very direct mechanism by which you could remove approximately 16% of your daily calories. Here's the counter argument that I'm going to make. Say you cut out booze. You're going to cut out, on average, the same amount of calories. However, where sugar has a little bit more of what I would call a direct impact, I think alcohol might actually be more deleterious indirectly beyond what it even does with regards to calories. So alcohol

has a very strong ability to negatively impact the quality of your sleep. We know now more than ever that sleep has a massive impact on body composition. Sleep, in fact, if you look at groups that get less than six hours of sleep, and again, I'm going to butcher the study because I don't know the study, but it effectively goes like this. They've looked at two groups. One gets six hours of sleep. One gets eight.

The group that gets less than six of the weight that they lose, most of it's muscle. The group that gets more than eight of the weight that they lose, most of it's body fat. They put these two groups on the same amount of calories. The only difference is how much sleep they get. Alcohol negatively impacts your sleep. This has been shown in the research time and time again. Because alcohol acts as a sedative, you might go to bed and knock out. However, there's absolutely no guarantee that any of the sleep that you're getting will be of a high

restorative quality. Sedation is very different than sleep. So that's one way in which alcohol consumption can indirectly negatively impact health performance and body composition. Another is with decision making. Alcohol is notorious for lowering inhibitions. The same reason you're willing to approach that hot girl at the bar and ask for her number with a corny pickup line when you've been drinking is the same reason you're likely to order nachos bel grande at 2am on the way home from the bars, even though you're trying to lose body fat. Alcohol reduces inhibitions and it impairs our ability to make decisions. So again, not to trash alcohol, not to trash alcohol consumption. This is just the way it

tends to shake out. And I think if we were to say, hey, look, what's worse, processed foods, sugar, or alcohol? I think it's pretty damn close to a three-way tie. Sugar is a little bit unique because most processed foods contain sugar, and most alcohol contains sugar, and they contain a bevy of other things. But when people refer to sugar colloquially, they're usually referring to hyperpalatable, high-calorie processed foods that taste sweet. So let's just say it's processed foods versus alcohol. And I would go so far as to say that given the fact that alcohol is so socially glorified, it's something that we celebrate, we do it all the time, and processed foods have become completely normal, that they're both on the same playing field with regards to how they're looked

at socially. More recently, processed foods have become something that we try to avoid. There have been people in the fitness space who've done a very good job of highlighting the potentially deleterious impact of consuming too much processed food. I think we all know that eating all of your diet or all of your nutrition from processed foods is going to be highly problematic for your long-term health. That being said, you know, the dialogue about how alcohol impacts your health is not something I see a lot in the fitness space. And I do think it's because alcohol consumption is a little bit more normal. And it's something that a lot of people have some degree of control over. You also have

to be over the age of 21 to drink. But, you know, overall, I don't think there's anything healthy about consuming alcohol. I would go so far as to say a lot of people will argue about the French paradox and they'll say, well, look at the French, you know, they looked at this longitudinal data and they showed that they had a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease despite eating a much higher fat diet. That had to be because of the red wine. That was something that was cited a lot in the 80s and 90s before I was born, but my dad actually made wine growing red wine. That was something that was cited a lot in the 80s and 90s before I was born, but my dad actually made wine growing up, so it was something I was very familiar with. And, you know, I would challenge that notion and say, what would a glass of wine

do that a glass of grape juice could not? Is it, in fact, the inclusion of alcohol that lowered the risk of cardiovascular disease? Or was it the inclusion of antioxidant-rich, micronutrient-dense fruit juice? So again, things to consider with regards to alcohol. I would say if you do drink daily, try to keep it to one to two drinks max. If you do have an issue with over-consuming alcohol, maybe look into getting help, particularly if your goal is losing weight. If you want to lose body fat, you want to be healthy, you want to perform at the highest level, I think you need to be even more careful with your alcohol consumption. So guys, that's it. Just an honest little quick look at alcohol. What I think if I was working with a client at the highest level,

I wouldn't want them consuming any alcohol at all if that were at all possible. And it wasn't something that was going to drastically reduce the quality of their life or majorly hamper what they want to do socially. If somebody told me they absolutely love drinking, I would probably say limit how much you do it. Try to enjoy it socially and responsibly. For anybody who listened this far, I really appreciate you doing so. If you enjoyed today's episode, do me a solid.

Share it. Share it with somebody who you think might need to hear it, share it to your Instagram story or tag me, and even better, leave me a five-star written rating and review on iTunes. If you had a problem with anything I said, shoot me an email. The link is in my Instagram bio, or just hit me at Danny at CoachDannyMatranga.com. Speaking of which, for more free resources, articles, and guides, go to www.CoachDannyMatranga.com. Speaking of which, for more free resources, articles, and guides, go to www.coachdannymatringa.com. Have a good one.