The One Food Group to Avoid Completely IF You Want to Be Healthy

This food group is one of the most easily accessible, yet one of the most harmful things you can put in your body. That food group is alcohol.

Despite what you might hear about how “a few drinks can be beneficial to your heart health”, these statements fail to reflect upon the importance of the MANY other issues that alcohol causes in our body.

Alcohol has many harmful effects on your body, the most notable being your brain, liver, heart, and digestive track. There is nothing good for your body when it comes to consuming alcohol.

Alcohol effects your body in various ways, with any amount consumed- you don’t have to go out for a night of binge drinking with your friends to have the harmful effects of alcohol impact your body.

In a journal conducted by doctors with the National Institute On Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism, the doctors discussed the process of alcohol being broken down in the body: “During social drinking, defined here as an average of two standard drinks, the body typically processes the ingested alcohol with no harmful effects through a process called oxidative conversion, during which the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) converts alcohol into the toxin acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) then converts acetaldehyde into acetate”. Consumption of alcohol can lead to increased inflammation in the gut and this carries many health issues with it as well: “…both the small and large intestine can be affected by alcohol and its metabolites as the result of its oxidative and nonoxidative metabolism. Metabolism of alcohol in the GI tract can then lead to disruption of tissue homeostasis toward a chronic state of intestinal inflammation”. So with scientifically proven evidence, you can see how the effects of just two alcoholic drinks can play a major role in your body, but it doesn’t just stop there.

Your “gut” microbiome controls a lot of other processes in your body as well as handling the most important task; living. Digestion is crucial, not only for overall health, but if you are unable to digest food properly, it makes getting nutrients to your body harder, which makes your body work harder to survive. The better gut health you can have, the overall better health and organ function you will have, making it easier for you body to work, and increasing health as well as adding years onto your life; but by consuming too much alcohol, you weaken your digestive track, which ultimately leads to other issues.

Your brain is basically a really dynamic information processing database through the billions of neurons that you have inside your head. Alcohol plays a large role in slowing down the rate at which signals can be sent through these neurons, often reducing motor skills, slurring speech, and making it hard to recall information. This study also showed how an excess amount of alcohol consumption can shrink the size of the brain & brain stem. Over consumption of alcohol over time has extremely harmful effects on your body. Your brain controls all of the processing of information and systems for your body, and a decrease in brain function can lead to decreased cognitive function, motor skills, and lead to diseases that stem from alcohol abuse.

Another major organ that alcohol effects is your liver. Alcohol is proven to cause liver disease, fatty liver, and alcohol hepatitis when over consumed. “As alcohol is broken down in the liver, a number of potentially dangerous by-products are generated” – the acetate generated from the breakdown of the alcohol travels throughout the bloodstream and is filtered out through the liver. Your liver and kidneys do a majority of the filtering out of toxins from your system, and alcohol, especially in large amounts can have major impacts on your liver. When your liver goes through the process of breaking alcohol down, alcohol breaks down the cell membranes within the liver, ultimately destroying the liver. This is just another point to prove that any amount of alcohol is not good for your body. The processes are all the same whether you have 1 shot or 11 shots.

Alcohol has harmful effects on your heart as well. It can lead to higher levels of fats in the blood, heart disease, irregular heart beats, and even increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes. The argument to that, and I am sure that you have heard this one, is that red wine is good for you… while this is a claim made by limited and biased research, the few beneficial effects of red wine do not outweigh the many of negative effects that alcohol has on your body. The same results and beneficial effects from red wine can also be consumed through grape juice or a grape concentrate, red wine is not the only way to obtain the benefits that red wine may provide.

Lastly, alcohol effects progress in the gym. Dr. Jade Teta, from T- Nation wrote a great article about the effects of alcohol when it comes to fitness, building muscle, and cutting fat. Some of the main concerns when it comes to alcohol in regards to fitness is that

- Your body has a tough time converting alcohol into energy.

- It slows the protein- muscle synthesis, slowing down the muscle gaining process.

- It slows the bodies consumption of other nutrients, but your body has trouble converting alcohol to energy, ultimately taking time to convert alcohol to energy, not using the energy stores readily available, and leading to a slowed down rate of fat loss.

- Alcohol contains a lot of empty calories.

But enough with the fun facts. Each one of us has our vices and our habits. Life is all about balance. If drinking a couple nights per week is your way to relax and unwind, then so be it. Life is too short to not be doing what makes you happy. If you are trying to fine tune your training and diet, and you are a heavy consumer of alcohol, I would highly recommend that you limit your alcohol consumption and see how your body reacts. If drinking socially is something you enjoy, I also recommend taking a supplement from The Ambrosia Collective, Nektar. What this is, is a super charge to your immune system. With a dozen different ingredients, it increases overall organ function, including all of the organs that alcohol has major effects on. This is a helpful cure to a night of drinking and crucial for taking care of your body, plus this stuff tastes delicious… So, there it is, plain and simple. All of the effects that alcohol plays on your body. So next time you’re out with friends, or if you’re trying to take your fitness lifestyle to the next level, you can think about how alcohol plays a major role in that.

Be sure to join the conversation with the hashtag “#WolfPack”. I will be doing weekly giveaways for people that tag #MaxWolfFitness & #WolfPack! Become part of the movement in learning more about your body and reaching new levels physically AND mentally to become the best possible version of yourself.

- Max Wolf