Understanding the Side Effects of Alcohol and Developing a Healthy Relationship

Let’s chat about the side effects of alcohol, how drinking impacts your health, and how you can develop a healthy relationship with alcohol if it’s part of your life.

After adopting a whole-food diet and practicing a balanced lifestyle, you may still find yourself in situations where you want to drink alcohol. And that’s quite alright! A balanced lifestyle can certainly include an intentional approach to mindful drinking where alcohol is enjoyable. Alcohol doesn’t necessarily have to be something you remove from your lifestyle altogether.

But with that said, it’s important to understand what exactly alcohol does to your body. Additionally, how you can take care of your body while participating in alcohol consumption.

This article will arm you with the knowledge you need to take care of yourself before, during, and after drinking. You’ll learn about the side effects of alcohol and how your body processes it. That way, you can prioritize your health and wellbeing the next time you choose to partake.

So What’s Happening Inside the Body When You Drink?

Let’s talk about the logistics of what’s actually happening when you drink.

Alcohol is very quickly absorbed through the lining of our stomachs in the small intestine. It then travels directly into the bloodstream in the veins, finally leading it to the liver. After it reaches the liver, it’s exposed to enzymes and metabolized.

After alcohol is absorbed into the bloodstream, it’s broken down into carbon dioxide and water. At this point, our body determines it to be the highest priority item in the body to take care of. Everything else will then be delayed until it’s cleared (think digestion of other food and the absorption of other nutrients).

As this is happening, blood sugar levels are actually decreased as a result of the liver working hard to clear the alcohol. This causes an increase in hunger levels, think of those ‘drunk munchies’ here. The increase in hunger you experience is one of the first side effects of alcohol you may feel.

How Do Men and Women Differ?

Men can actually metabolize alcohol quicker than women, thanks to men biologically having more of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH). This statistic serves as a credit to the theory that women can drink the same as men and feel alcohol’s effects quicker, along with the fact that men typically weigh more than women and carry more water in their bodies.

Your BAC (blood alcohol content) level determines how much of an effect the alcohol has on the body. It determines how quickly alcohol is absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and excreted. Many lifestyle factors come into play when considering the rate that our bodies can process a drink, such as when our last meal was, and what we had to eat.

Research has shown that women appear to have more adverse effects as a result of consuming alcohol than men, too. Apart from feeling more drunk than men after having the same number of drinks, women may be more susceptible than men to alcohol-related organ damage. More on that next.

Lastly, women have another factor to consider as well, hormones. The delicate hormonal balance can be affected when our bodies react to alcohol consumption. Drinking increases the hormones cortisol and estrogen while decreasing the hormone progesterone.

The Physical Side Effects of Alcohol

Now that we understand what it actually means to drink alcohol, let’s discuss the side effects alcohol can cause when a negative relationship is present.

Heavy drinking can cause a multitude of physical health problems over time. For context, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines heavy drinking for men to be consuming more than 4 drinks on any day or more than 14 drinks per week. For women, it’s defined as consuming more than 3 drinks on any day or more than 7 drinks per week.

People who drink heavily have a greater risk of liver disease, heart disease, sleep disorders, depression, stroke, bleeding from the stomach, sexually transmitted infections from unsafe sex,