Ways to make drinking wine (and other alcohol) healthier

Ways to make drinking wine (and other alcohol) healthier

In response to a few conversations I’ve had with individuals in our class about the health effects of alcohol, I’m providing a short write up on a few of the methods I understand to reduce the long term damage done by drinking. This list is not exhaustive – I’ve tried to keep it simple rather than delve into the litany of compounds that show up in an Amazon search for ‘hangover cure’. Instead, this is a few of the best bang for your buck ideas to attenuate the long term effects of an occasional FOAM night.

1)      Get out there and run, lift weights, goat yoga, whatever.

It’s not news to any of you that exercise is important to your health. But did you know that the act of getting your heart rate up changes the way your body processes alcohol? There are a few different ways in which this happens:

·         Converting sugars: we know that a hard workout burns a ton of calories, but what if we don’t have that energy readily available from a recent meal? Our body is smart, it stores extra energy in the muscles and liver as glycogen, a carb storage tank that we often dip into challenging exercise sessions (think Barry’s or a quick Dish run). Wine contains sugar leftover from the fermentation process in varying amounts -- dry wines have less than an ice wine, but they’ve all got some. Drinking after a hard workout will ensure that some of the sugar from alcohol is converted into liver glycogen and thus spends less time hanging around in your body, which is great news.

·         Lowering inflammation to allow wine to be “heart healthy”: whether you believe it or not, we’ve all heard that red wine is “heart healthy”. However, when researchers introduced wine into some individuals lives and tracked their cholesterol, blood glucose, triglycerides, and C-reactive proteins (proxy for inflammation), there was no improvement. However, those who worked out twice a week saw significant benefit to health markers. So what gives? It turns out that exercise sets in motion a whole host of processes in our body that allow us to get the benefit out of wine, whether it’s red or white.

·         Keeping the brain healthy: Individuals who regularly binge drink, defined as 4+ drinks for women or 5+ drinks for men (a foreign concept to many of us) often see cognitive declines when this behavior is repeated over extended periods of time. However, individuals who exercised a few times a week and drank frequently were found to have significantly better brain health markers than those who drank but did not exercise.

2)      Don’t drink bad wine/alcohol (all the time)

Wine is similar to any other consumer product – up to a certain point, you get what you pay for. In order to compete on price, wineries are forced to take shortcuts. These cheaper mass growing ops are expected to make grapes for a few hundred dollars per ton. Some of those shortcuts may be additional spraying, fewer soil /water tests, and adding in flavoring agents. Recently, there was a lawsuit in California, after testing found that a wide variety of cheap wines (think Beringer, Charles Shaw, Franzia, Sutter, etc.) had up to 5 times the level of arsenic allowable in typical drinking water. Before you stress out: unless you’re drinking wine like you drink water, it’s probably not enough to cause serious damage. But it does go to illustrate the quality control tradeoffs that come with producing cheap wine.

3)      When you’re drinking above average amounts, give your body above average nutrients

You probably wouldn’t go into an important interview or test without at least considering your caffeine consumption / meal beforehand. So then why do so many of us go into a night of heavy drinking with no strategy other than maybe an ill supported  plan of ‘carb loading’? Processing alcohol takes nutrients, often ones that we don’t get enough of to begin with…and certainly don’t get at the right time, in the right dose. In order to help your body process alcohol, these nutrients need to be commensurate with consumption levels, and I haven’t seen a ton of folks chasing their tequila shots with green smoothies at the Patio.

No supplement or food will allow you to drink a couple bottles of wine and wake up feeling like sunshine. However, a few things will probably help your health in the long run if you’re a moderate to heavy drinker:

·         B complex vitamins (specifically B1, B12) – these are super important in our brains and bodies for the production of energy, and metabolizing alcohol burns through a ton of them. Consequently, these are best taken alongside alcohol when your body needs them most.

·         Electrolytes – think Pedialyte/coconut water, not Gatorade. Alcohol dehydrates you, and the best way to rehydrate is with a drink that closely mirrors the salt and sugar content that we have in our body. Don’t have any Pedialyte on hand? Eat some fruit and something salty with a few glasses of water before bed after a night out.

·         Healthy diet – I’m not going to tell you to give up that late night snack of choice. However, the healthier your diet is the rest of your week (think leafy greens, antioxidant rich berries, etc.) the better equipped your body will be to deal with and recover from the stresses of alcohol.

Disclaimer: This is intended to be somewhere on the two by two matrix of [informative vs interesting] between a Cosmo article and a research study. None of the above is intended as specific health advice.