Nutrition News

Alcohol Balancing the Picture

Alcohol seems to be everywhere—at parties, sporting events, dinners, celebrations, neighborhood bars—and because it is so common in our society, many young people come to trust alcohol and expect that it will play a part in their lives when they reach legal drinking age. Legally, the only restrictions placed on alcohol consumption by adults are designed to protect others from the drinker, for example the laws against drinking and driving. But what are alcohol's effects on the drinker?

Almost everybody has been warned of alcohol's addictive nature, yet many still feel a false sense of security about their drinking. Most drinkers have heard that alcohol lowers heart attack risks, but may be unaware of alcohol's more negative effects. Some may use the news about heart health to justify their fourth or fifth drink at a party as "good for their health." They want to believe that their drinking is a safe and healthy habit.

Most people need a more balanced picture of the nature of alcohol to make a rational decision about its use.

Is Alcohol Good for Heart Health?
No doubt remains that middle-aged men and women who drink moderately (one or two drinks a day) lower their risk for major coronary events.₁ This is good news, especially for middle-aged people who are at risk of suffering a heart attack.

However, the news isn't all good. Scientific design demands that studies about heart disease exclude all other possible effects of alcohol. By their very nature, such studies fail to address other effects of alcohol faced by people in the real world. The decision of whether to drink alcohol demands a broader perspective than the effects on heart disease alone.

For young people, especially, the risk of heart disease is most often a distant threat, but their risks from traffic fatalities, violence, and sexually transmitted diseases are all immediate, and greatly increased when they drink alcohol.

Does Alcohol Cause Cancer?
No one can say whether or not alcohol causes cancer. What can be said with confidence is that drinkers develop certain cancers more often than do nondrinkers. Many studies have found relationships between alcohol consumption and breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, cancers of the mouth and throat, cancers of the colon and rectum, and other cancers. The relationship is strongest among people who drink most heavily, but even moderate drinkers consuming just a drink or two a day seem prone to suffer from more cancers than nondrinkers.

Does the cancer-alcohol association wipe out any benefit that alcohol might provide to the heart? It depends upon who you are. A middle-aged person with a history of heart disease may very well decide that the heart benefit of moderate drinking balances alcohol's other risks. However, a young person rarely faces a heart disease threat, and may decide that alcohol's immediate risks are not worth a possible distant benefit.

Alcohol's Effects on Body Organs
Heavy doses of alcohol damage many of the body's organs from the brain and liver to the blood vessels and the lenses of the eyes. Normally, the body can recover the functioning of these organs when the person stops drinking. However, after years of heavy drinking, much organ function may be lost forever. Play the Fun Stuff interaction and discover the specific effects alcohol has on the body organs.

Alcohol's Role in Accidents
More young people die or are permanently injured from alcohol-related traffic accidents each year than from any other cause. Drinking slows reaction times, and drinking before and while driving is the single greatest hazard on the road. More than half of all fatal automobile and motorcycle accidents involve alcohol.

Not only traffic accidents but drownings, fatal falls, suicide attempts, homicides, and rapes are more likely when people drink alcohol. People who have been drinking are also very likely to be the victims of violent crimes.

Alcohol, Aggression, Crime, and Violence
Up to 86 percent of all homicides are committed by people who had been drinking at the time of the crime. ₂ One-third to two-thirds of all assaults, rapes, suicides, family violence, and child abuse are attributed to the effects of alcohol. It may be that alcohol disrupts normal brain functioning in ways that weakens restraint against aggressive or violent behavior.

Most violent crimes are committed by people who have drunk heavily enough to produce blood alcohol levels from 0.10 to 0.30 percent. These people are not necessarily violent criminals when sober. Under the influence of alcohol, however, they become violent.

Also, alcohol impairs the brain's ability to normally process information, and so may lead to misinterpretation of social events and cues. A person who has been drinking may perceive a threat or insult where none exists, and respond with unexpected aggression. For people in whom alcohol triggers angry reactions, the choice to drink alcohol is not a sound one.

Alcohol and Sexual Behaviors
Alcohol seriously impairs people's judgement, resulting in two effects that make unplanned and unprotected sexual behaviors more likely. First, alcohol reduces inhibitions, including inhibitions against risky sexual behaviors. Second, alcohol makes people groggy or, in high doses, unconscious.

In the first case, someone not planning to have sexual intercourse may do so, and forgo protection despite knowledge of the extreme risks to health of this behavior. In the second case, an extremely dangerous situation exists in which a person who passes out is at the mercy of whomever else is present. Under such circumstances, ordinary dates have resulted in rapes committed by others who also were impaired by alcohol.

Alcohol and Sexually Transmitted Diseases
Strong links exist between young people who drink alcohol and those who acquire a sexually transmitted disease (STD), such as gonorrhea, herpes, syphilis, the virus that causes AIDS (HIV), or the virus that causes cervical cancer (HPV). ₃ People who drink alcohol often engage in the risky sexual behaviors that make contracting STDs likely.

Even just the alcohol in one drink reduces inhibitions and relaxes a person's resolve. Risky situations suddenly seem less risky. More alcohol worsens self-control, until even normally cautious people take unbelievable risks.

Alcohol and Body Weight
In this country, fully half of the adult population is overweight and the number of people who are obese is rising. ₄ At the same time, many adults drink alcohol. Scientists do not agree about the degree of relationship between these two conditions, but some evidence supports the idea that they may indeed be related.

People who drink moderately generally take their alcoholic beverages in addition to the food they would ordinarily eat—the alcohol is extra. At 4 calories per gram of alcohol, the excess calories from alcohol equal those from a similar amount of sugar or other carbohydrate. Alcohol adds approximately 6 to 10 percent of the total calories to the diet of a moderate drinker.

In addition, alcohol interferes with the body's normal metabolism of fat, making it more likely that fat will be stored instead of used up. When alcohol is present in the body, its first priority is to use up the alcohol to get rid of it, because alcohol is a toxin. Fat, on the other hand, can safely be stored in adipose tissue. Therefore, gain of body fat is a likely consequence of moderate drinking.

People who drink excessively and chronically face a different weight problem. The toxic nature of alcohol causes them to lose weight. People addicted to alcohol often derive half of their daily calories from alcohol—they consume alcohol instead of food. This situation makes dangerous and unhealthy weight loss almost a certainty. Alcohol may provide calories, but those calories do not support healthy body tissue as do the calories from food.

₁ T. A. Pearson, Alcohol and Heart Disease, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 65 (1997): 1567-1569.

₂ J. Roizen, Epidemiological issues in alcohol-related violence, in M. Galanter, ed. Recent Developments in Alcoholism (New York: Plenum Press, 1997), pp. 7-40.

₃ T. R. Eng and W. T. Butler, eds., The Hidden Epidemic: Confronting Sexually Transmitted Diseases (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997), pp. 77-78.

₄ P. M. Suter, E. Hasler. W. Vetter, Effects of alcohol on energy metabolism and body weight regulation: Is alcohol a risk factor for obesity? Nutrition Reviews 55 (1997): 157-171.

Related Links:

National Association for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
http://www.nofas.org
Visit this site for information about preventing fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and for strategies helpful in caring for FAS children. Also find many links to sites for private organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon, and Alateen.

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
http://www.niaaa.nih.gov
Don't miss this site! Call it up to explore a huge array of readable, reliable, up-to-date reviews, monographs, quick facts, and other goodies concerning alcohol use and abuse. You'll be led to many links with other substance abuse and health-related government resources, and shown paths to much diverse information.

National Commission Against Drunk Driving
http://www.ncadd.com/index.html
If you want to know more about the nation's laws, sanctions, statistics, and personal stories concerning alcohol-impaired driving, look here. This site offers many detailed descriptions from around the country.

Alcoholics Anonymous
http://www.aa-intergroup.org/
For people recovering from alcoholism or for those who wish to recover, this site offers on-line AA meetings, 12-Step chat rooms, newsgroups, and mailing lists.