WHAT DOES ALCOHOL DO TO YOUR BODY?

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While drinking alcohol is itself not necessarily a problem, drinking too much can cause a range of consequences, and increases your risk for a variety of problems. According to the NIAAA, men who take five or more drinks during a single drinking session or more than 14 drinks in a week, and women who have four or more drinks during a day or more than seven drinks a week are considered heavy drinkers.

As long as you are not a heavy drinker, your health risks from alcohol are low. According to a research conducted by NIAAA, only 2% of people whose drinking levels are in the “low risk” category develop alcohol abuse disorders or alcoholism.

If you are a heavy drinker, alcohol may cause damage to the following parts in your body, affecting its efficiency:

Brain

After a few drinks, your memory becomes impaired (temporarily), increasingly worsening as consumption increases. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, most heavy long-term alcohol users experience mild to moderate impairment of intellectual functioning (permanently) as well as diminished brain size. Another common impairment is to do with the ability to think abstractly as well as perceive and/or remember the location of objects.

Drinking too much, especially on an empty stomach, can result in a blackout. Occasional drinkers will usually recover from a blackout without any lasting mental problems, although acute alcohol intoxication can cause you to engage recklessly in activities like unprotected sex, vandalism, and drunk driving.

Heart

Even having more than three drinks at a stretch increases your blood pressure, although temporarily. Repeated binge drinking can, however, lead to long-term increase in BP levels. Alcohol also mitigates the effectiveness of blood pressure medications and also increase their side effects.

Alcohol also increases triglyceride levels and lowers the HDL (good) cholesterol, leading to heart disease.

Liver

Every time you drink, your liver filters the alcohol, killing some of the liver cells in the process. But because the liver is the only organ in your body that is capable of regeneration, it develops new cells. However, prolonged alcohol abuse over many years reduces its ability to regenerate and results in serious and permanent damage to your liver.

Moreover, as alcohol is broken down in the liver and converted into triglycerides and cholesterol, when the triglyceride levels become too high, they build up an cause fatty liver disease.

Pancreas

The pancreas helps regulate insulin use and response to glucose. When both the pancreas and the liver aren’t functioning properly, as is the case in alcoholics, there is a high chance of low blood sugar (hypoglycemia). A damaged pancreas may also prevent the body from producing enough insulin to utilise the sugar, leading to high blood sugar (hyperglycemia). This can make you diabetic or cause greater complications in persons who are already diabetic patients.

Damage caused by alcohol can also cause pancreatitis or inflammation of the pancreas.

Stomach

Alcohol irritates the lining of the stomach, causing your digestive juices to flow.This acid and alcohol build-up causes nausea and vomiting.

Heavy drinking, over the years, can also cause painful ulcers. Moreover, because there are high levels of stomach juices in the stomach, appetite is killed, resulting in lack of nutrition and health in drinkers.

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