Monday Master Blog: Sobering Facts About Alcohol

What does alcohol do to your body?
Drinking alcohol has a lot of effect on your body. It has immediate effects, but can also have consequences later. Alcohol also has a lot of influence on the brain and on how someone behaves.

What are the effects of alcohol on the body?

1. When you drink alcohol, it enters the bloodstream via the esophagus, stomach, and small intestine. The blood distributes the alcohol throughout the body.
2. It passes all your organs. That way, alcohol also enters the brain via the blood. Alcohol numbs the brain, which makes you behave differently. For example, you overestimate yourself more quickly, or you react more emotionally.
3. The alcohol passes the heart. The heart beats faster when someone has drunk alcohol, because the blood pressure drops first.
4. Alcohol also affects the kidneys and the skin. Alcohol makes the kidneys work harder. This causes your body to dehydrate faster. Your skin also becomes drier, which can cause skin problems if you drink regularly and a lot. For example, wrinkles become more visible and hives and eczema can worsen.
5. The liver ultimately ensures that the alcohol is broken down and removed from your body. If you drink a lot, the liver can become ill. The more alcohol you drink, the greater the effect on the organs and the body.

What does alcohol do to your body in the short term?
When you drink alcohol, you feel the effects quickly. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes for the alcohol to travel from your stomach and bloodstream to your brain. What happens to your body when you drink depends on how much and how quickly you drink. If someone only drinks occasionally, these effects can be more severe.

If you drink a little (1 to 3 glasses), your heart rate and breathing will increase. You will feel warm and you will feel less pain. Your sense of smell and taste will decrease. Your vision will also decrease, especially in the corners of your eyes, you will get tunnel vision. You will feel hungry and you will have to urinate more often.

If you drink more alcohol (4 to 7 glasses), your mood and behavior change clearly. You overestimate yourself more quickly and your memory gets worse. Your vision also gets worse.

If you drink more (more than 7 glasses), you will become emotional more quickly. Your face will become red and swollen and your pupils will dilate. You may feel nauseous and vomit.

If you drink even more (more than 15 glasses), then you see, smell, taste and hear even worse. You become confused and absent and little gets through to you.

If you drink more than 20 glasses, there is a good chance that you will pass out. Eventually, your brain can become so numb that you can stop breathing or have a cardiac arrest. You can then go into a coma and even die.

Alcohol is a caustic substance. It irritates and damages the protective mucous membrane of everything it touches directly. This mucous membrane is in the throat, mouth, esophagus and stomach. Some people may suffer more from this irritation than others. For example, you may notice this irritation as a burning sensation in your stomach or nausea after drinking alcohol.

What does alcohol do to your body in the long term?

Damage to the organs
In the long term, alcohol can damage your organs. Through the blood, alcohol comes into contact with the liver, kidneys, pancreas, lungs, heart and blood vessels, intestines and brain. People who regularly drink too much run the risk of serious damage to these organs in the long term. Research shows that people who drink a lot have an increased risk of various types of cancer. Drinking alcohol increases the risk of esophageal cancer, mouth cancer, throat cancer, larynx cancer, liver cancer, colon cancer and breast cancer (in women). The more someone drinks, the greater the risk of cancer.

Alcohol can also cause various liver diseases, such as liver inflammation and liver cirrhosis. The brain can also become ill from too much alcohol. Korsakoff's syndrome is a brain disease that causes serious confusion. In the long term, alcohol also causes cardiovascular diseases, such as stroke, heart attack or heart rhythm disorders.

Stomach complaints due to alcohol
Alcohol causes the muscle between the stomach and the esophagus to work less well. If you drink alcohol regularly and often, this can cause problems such as heartburn. The lining of the stomach can become inflamed as a result. This is called gastritis. Someone with gastritis can also suffer from other diseases, such as intestinal infections, stomach bleeding and vitamin B12 deficiency.

Alcohol and stress
Alcohol also affects hormones. For example, alcohol causes the liver to remove the stress hormone cortisol from the body less effectively. This can cause stress to build up. So you feel like you are relaxing when you drink, but in the long term, stress remains in the body. If someone has a lot of stress for a long time, this is also bad for the body and can cause many complaints. Furthermore, larger amounts of alcohol (more than 1-2 glasses) cause less testosterone. The body needs testosterone for muscle building, among other things.

What does alcohol do to your behavior?
Alcohol affects behavior because it has a numbing effect on the brain. When you drink alcohol, you become uninhibited: you can become happier and talk more. You may also drink more than you intended. You react more slowly to things and see less well. When you drink more, you can also react more emotionally than normal. You overestimate yourself and can become confused. This can also make you feel threatened more quickly and become aggressive.

Alcohol is bad for your brain. Alcohol can damage your brain if you drink too much for a long time (more than 25 standard glasses of alcohol per week). This makes your memory worse, you can think more slowly and you can adapt less well to new situations.

Enjoy consciously, but don't overdo it. Drinking too much damages your health and well-being. Sports helps to process the negative consequences. Exercise stimulates your metabolism, improves your resistance and gives you more energy. Choose balance and responsibility!

Collin Plasschaert
Enforce Master Trainer
collin@enforce.nl
 

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