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.
