Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 247: Alcohol, Health and Fitness. The Truth.

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Thanks For Listening!Here's a bullet-point list of the things we've discussed:Alcohol can disrupt your sleepCauses sleep to be lighter and less restfulIncreases the number of times you wake upCan cause snoring and sleep apneaBest to avoid consuming before bedtimeAlcohol can impact your eating habitsStimulates appetite and makes you feel hungrierImpairs judgement and decision-makingLEAVE A REVIEW OF THE SHOW:There is NOTHING more valuable to a podcast than leaving a written review and a 5-Star Rating. Please consider taking 1-2 minutes to do that (iTunes) HERE. You can also leave a review on SPOTIFY!OUR PARTNERS:  Ice Barrel: The best cold water immersion and recovery solution on the market HERE! Use the CODE: Danny to save $125!Legion Supplements (protein, creatine, + more!), Shop (DANNY) HERE!Melin makes the BEST hat's on earth. Try one using the CODE DANNY to save 20% HERE!Get Your FREE LMNT Electrolytes HERE! Care for YOUR Gut, Heart, and Skin with SEED Symbiotic (save with “DANNY15)  ! Take your love of sports to the next level with UNDERDOG FANTASY and play with danny HERE! (CODE: DANNY for first deposit match up to $100!)RESOURCES/COACHING:  Train with Danny on His Training AppHEREI am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE!Want Coach Danny to Fix Your S*** (training, nutrition, lifestyle, etc) fill the form HERE for a chance to have your current approach reviewed live on the show. Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Follow Coach Danny on YOUTUBEFollow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE! Sign up for the trainer mentorship HERESupport the Show.

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you can use the same way as cash every time you use the code and you'll also be supporting the show. Welcome back into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast, everyone. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And in today's episode, we will be discussing alcohol. Alcohol is ubiquitous in American culture. And quite frankly, it's ubiquitous globally. If you turn on any television event, whether it be a sporting event or a movie, you are going to see commercials for alcohol. And it's for this reason I have kind of skirted around this topic for quite some time. I am heavily biased given that I grew up in a household with a substantial amount of alcohol abuse, and I have seen it in my family. And that is a reason that I decided not to drink as an adult. However, I wanted to make sure that that

decision was rooted in what I believed to be sound scientific principle. So I kind of dove down the rabbit hole of trying to better understand just how negative alcohol can be for our health, the ways it affects our health, how it affects our body composition, how it affects our sleep, what amounts and to what degrees can alcohol be enjoyed safely, what are the trade-offs and much more? So that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. I do want to preface this first and say that if you do enjoy alcohol, I think that's fine.

But I do think you should be aware of how it affects your health. And just because I've had a unique experience with it that certainly has made my decisions about alcohol consumption different from most. I'm not on some puritanical soapbox acting as though I'm better than you. I don't think you should do only things in life that are healthy. I think you should enjoy and find balance. And I hope this podcast helps you find balance with how it is you choose to consume alcohol if you choose to consume it at all. So without further ado, sit back and enjoy. Okay, so it wouldn't be fair to have a discussion about alcohol if we didn't first define what it is that we are talking about. So alcohol as a classification, right? We're talking about alcoholic beverages, right? These are drinks that contain ethanol or some other type of alcohol that is produced via fermentation.

alcoholic beverages people enjoy. We've got beer, which is usually made from hops, rye, barley, being fermented, and that's how you get beer. Tequila is usually made from agave. Vodka is usually made from potatoes. And then, of course, there's different types of tequila, there's different types of vodka. Wine is made from fermentation of grapes. White wine comes from white wine grapes and red wine comes from red wine grapes. And it's not that hops, rye, barley, agave, potatoes, and grapes don't impart some unique nutritional benefits. In fact, those ingredients in isolation could have health promoting things about them, right? Like we know grapes can be very high in antioxidants, particularly the skins, which contain resveratrol. But when you ferment them and you produce ethanol,

you are probably offsetting all of those effects with the presence of the ethanol, which is the drug in alcohol. So one of the things you need to know about ethanol or ethyl alcohol is that every single organ in the body is affected by alcohol consumption. It is actually a depressant. So it's a central nervous system depressant. A lot of people take alcohol with the intention of going out and partying or they communicate a inhibitions lowered effect that makes them want to go out and do things. But at its core, alcohol is actually acting as a central nervous system depressant. And it is rapidly absorbed in the stomach and small intestines, where it then makes its way to the bloodstream, at which point it moves throughout

the body rather quickly. Now, your liver is in charge of metabolizing alcohol when it enters the body, because again, it's going to be detected as a toxin, but it can only take so much on at one time. So the excess alcohol in the body is going to be circulating. That is the excess that cannot be consumed by the liver. And that's what you're working with when you're drinking. So whatever you drink, the liver is going to take on as much as it can and the rest will circulate, which will be directly correlated with what you feel. Now, I think it's first important to outline a standard drink before we have too many discussions here or get too deep into discussion here, which is what exactly is one serving of alcohol? Now,

with food, we have a pretty tight understanding. With other drugs like cannabis, we really don't. What's a serving of cannabis? Is it one joint? Probably not. Not for most people anyway. Is it one bowl in a bong? Probably not for most people. That's probably more than one serving. Could it be an edible? Absolutely not. Edibles can be some of the strongest form of cannabis. So cannabis is really hard. Food is really, really easy. Obviously, prescription medications come with very, very clear administration instruction because they're being prescribed by a doctor. But when it comes to alcoholic beverages, one standard drink contains 14 grams of pure

alcohol. Here's something interesting that I think all of you need to know. 14 grams of alcohol has a caloric weight attached to it in the amount of 98 calories. Why? Because alcohol has seven calories per gram. This is something that a lot of people don't know. So seven calories per gram at 14 grams per drink means you're getting 98, basically a hundred calories just from alcohol in each drink. This does not include the sugar calories that you'll find in wine, the carbohydrate calories that you will find in beer, right? And this is why oftentimes people who are looking to drink and maintain a certain body mass opt for single shots of tequila or vodka because there's usually

not associative calories beyond the alcohol. But when you start making mixed drinks, you can get two, three, 400 calories per beverage with multiple servings of alcohol. So what does a serving look like to the naked eye? So a 12-ounce beer with a 5% alcohol content would be one drink. Eight ounces of malt liquor, 7% alcohol content, one drink. We're working our way back to that 14 gram number, okay? A five ounce glass of wine with a 12% ABV or alcohol content would be one drink. And a 1.5 ounce shot of 80 proof, 40% alcohol content distilled spirits for liquor like gin, rum, vodka, whiskey, et cetera, that would be one drink. So 12 ounce beer, eight ounces of malt liquor, five ounces of wine, 1.5 ounces or one shot of 80 proof liquor or higher, that's going to count as a one drink. Now, depending on what

your vice is, you might consume more or less. You might have one beer, you might have two glasses of wine, you might have three shots. That's hard to say. But one thing we know for sure is excessive alcohol use or binge drinking is dangerous. It is unhealthy. It can lead to a lot of negative health effects. Okay. Heavy drinking could be defined as 15 or more drinks per week for men and eight or more drinks per week for women. And I want you to think about the discrepancy there between men and women. This is something that I think is important for women. And I want you to think about the discrepancy there between men and women. This is something that I think is important for women to consider. And that is that you need to be uniquely careful with your alcohol intake as a woman, because in most instances, a full grown

adult women, woman will be smaller than her full adult grown male counterpart. Meaning when you are ingesting carbohydrate, protein, fat based on your body weight and based on your goals, you will probably have numbers that are different and usually smaller because of your smaller body mass. Well, the same thing is true of drugs and alcohol being a carcinogen, being a toxin, you need to be aware that you might not be able to drink as much as your male counterpart without seeing equivalent deleterious effects. So if we consider a dangerous amount of drinking to be eight drinks per week, this isn't to say that anything less than that is healthy either.

It's very clear that even one drink will probably promote more negative health effects than it does positive health effects because the effect of ethyl alcohol in the body will offset whatever small antioxidant effect you get. This is removing the social benefit that often comes from going out and drinking with friends. We're trying to be agnostic about that and really approach alcohol from a more scientific standpoint here. But there's a huge discrepancy between a healthy amount of alcohol for men and a healthy amount of alcohol for women. Obviously, it should be no surprise that women need to make special considerations when it comes to pregnancy and breastfeeding. You are probably very aware that you cannot or should not drink when pregnant or breastfeeding because it can obviously affect the health of a baby. Women who are pregnant or even planning on becoming pregnant

need to be very, very aware of the obvious, but there's also things that many people don't know about like fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, which can be quite damaging to a child. And even binge drinking episodes have a direct link to unintended pregnancies, which should surprise almost nobody, but you don't want to expose a developing fetus to alcohol. So those were some unique considerations that I wanted to make sure that we discussed as it pertains to women's physiology specifically. And lastly, let's talk about alcohol use disorders. I think this is very, very important to underline. And that's that about 90% of people who drink excessively would not be expected to meet the clinical diagnostic criteria for having an alcohol

use disorder, meaning not everybody who drinks excessively is an alcoholic. Okay. A severe alcohol use disorder. Also you, this used to be known as alcohol dependence or alcoholism. Okay. They changed the verbiage is a chronic illness with some unique signs outside of excessive drinking, not being able to shut it off or the inability to limit your drinking, continuing to drink, despite having personal or professional things in place that would lead you not to drink. Meaning like you have good reasons not to be drinking a lot of alcohol, but you can't seem to stop yourself from drinking a lot of alcohol. Those are all signs that you might have a dependence disorder. Okay. Continuously needing to drink

more and more to get the same effect and constantly thinking about alcohol. So if that sounds like you pause the podcast right now, or don't pause it right now, do something about it. Find somebody, talk to somebody, because this is a very serious problem. Alcoholism is an extremely damaging condition. And if you look at the effect, the danger of drug use relative to the effect it has on the people around the drug abuser, alcohol is at the top of the list. It is the most damaging drug because of what it does to families, what it does to partners, what it does to children. If you have reached a level of alcohol consumption, not to sound puritanical though, where you believe addiction or alcoholism, or you're drinking way beyond these thresholds and you're having a hard time dialing it back, I would strongly encourage you to get help. Okay. So I think that that kind of underscores the fundamentals. What's going on

guys? Coach Danny here, taking a break from the episode to tell you about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method, and more specifically, our one-on-one fully tailored online coaching program. My online coaching program has kind of been the flagship for Core Coaching Method for a while. Of course, we do have PDF programming and we have app-based programming. But if you want a truly tailored one-on-one experience with a coach like myself or a member of my coaching team, someone who is certified, somebody who has multiple years of experience working with clients in person online, somebody who is licensed to provide a macro nutrition plan, somebody who is actually good at communicating with clients because they've done it for years, whether that be via phone call,

email, text, right? This one-on-one coaching program is really designed to give you all the support you need with custom training designed for you, whether you're training from home, the gym, around your limitations and your goals, nothing cookie cutter here, as well as easy to follow macro nutrition programs that are non-restrictive. You'll get customized support directly from your coach's email, or they'll text you, or they'll WhatsApp you. We'll find the communication medium that best supports your goals, as well as provides you with accountability in the expertise you need to succeed, as well as biofeedback monitoring, baked-in accountability support, and all of the

stuff that you need from your coach when you check in. We keep our rosters relatively small so that we can make sure you get the best support possible. But you can apply today by going over to corecoachingmethod.com, selecting the online coaching option. And if we have spots available, we'll definitely reach out to you to see if you're a good candidate. And if we don't, put you on a waiting list, but we'll be sure to give you the best shot at the best coaching in the industry. So head over to corecoachingmethod.com and apply for one-on-one coaching with me and my team today. Hey, everybody, but I have a favor to ask you. If you're a regular listener or somebody who gets value out of this podcast, somebody who's learning from me on your health and fitness journey,

whether you're a trainer, a high-level athlete, or you're just getting started, other people need this kind of advice. And the best way for you to help me grow the podcast is to take a little bit of time, literally one to two minutes max, to leave a rating and review on the app that you listen to your podcasts on. The majority of you probably listen on an iPhone and you probably listen on Apple podcasts, but many of you listen on Spotify. Both platforms allow you to leave a quick, easy review. And if you could leave me a five-star review plus a short one to two sentence blurb about what you like, not only will it help more people reach the podcast, it will help me to continue to refine what it is I bring you each and every week. Thanks so much for doing this. It means the world to me. It helps me achieve my

dream of helping more people live a healthier life. Enjoy the episode. Hey guys, taking a break from the action to tell you about one of our favorite new sponsors, Underdog Fantasy. If you're like me, you love sports. Sports was actually how I got into fitness in the first place. And one of my favorite things to do when I'm not working out or working with my clients is watch and engage in sports with my friends. Underdog is the best fantasy sports app out there for best ball and for pick them. If you like football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, WNBA, UFC, boxing, underdog has something exciting for you. You can bet on your favorite teams. You can bet on your favorite players in the easiest and simplest way to engage at a higher level with sports. It's so much fun to be able to do a

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your body physiologically from an organ system by organ system thing. Okay. We're going to go over some bullet points. Then we're going to talk about each organ system. We'll talk about sleep. We'll talk about cancer and we'll talk about diet. Okay. The big rocks. We know alcohol affects sleep, makes it less effective. The sleep that you get makes it less restful. It will increase the number of times you wake up, can increase snoring and sleep apnea. Okay. Probably better not to drink deep into the evening. We'll talk about more, more about sleep. We know it can increase appetite, make you hungrier, impairs food judgment and decision, can even impair and interfere with nutrient absorption. We'll talk about diet in a minute. Lastly, we know that alcohol is a known risk factor for various different types of cancers. We will talk all about that.

So alcohol as a drug is commonly going to be consumed for one reason and one reason alone, and that is that it has a pleasurable and relaxing effect that reduces inhibitions. This is why many people engage with a variety of different drugs with a variety of different kind of pathways for eliciting either relaxation, pleasure, or inhibition reduction. Alcohol does, even at healthy doses, have, or sub, let's call it sub-addictive, sub-obviously dangerous doses, have the ability to impair cognitive function and coordination, which is why you probably don't want to drink and exercise, and it's definitely a good reason not to drink and drive. you don't want to drink and exercise, and it's definitely a good reason not to drink and drive.

Organ system number one that we need to discuss when we talk about alcohol is the kind of, the organ itself is the liver, but it is the detoxification pathway. So high amounts of alcohol consumption place a considerable strain on the liver. Okay. That is probably the most, the tissue that stands to see the most damaging effect from overconsumption of alcohol, because it is responsible for metabolizing alcohol. And when you drink all the time, it can lead to alcoholic fatty liver disease. It can lead to cirrhosis. It can lead to death of various cells within the liver that can ultimately make it substantially harder to function. Okay. So you've got to take good care of your liver, no matter what it is that you do, because it is responsible for detoxification. It is responsible for playing

a role in filtration in the body, right? So many people go out and do like an IV or a juice cleanse after a bunch of binge drinking because they feel like they need to help their liver detoxify, which isn't like an inherently bad idea or like half-baked notion, but you got to remember the whole reason that you're detoxifying your body after drinking is because you just pumped it full of a bunch of shit that's really going to tax your liver. So you need to be careful with the liver and take good care of that if you're going to be drinking. Okay. Beyond the liver, right? We need to take a time to talk about the fact that alcohol is a known carcinogen, right? We discussed that we would talk about cancer.

Alcohol is a known risk factor for several different types of cancer, right? Cancer of the mouth, throat, and esophagus, which shouldn't surprise anybody because when you're drinking, it's going through your mouth, throat, and esophagus. It can increase, obviously, liver cancer, which is more rare, but it can happen. I do believe, and this is, I'm not a doctor, but I do believe you're more likely to develop liver complications before you would develop a liver cancer from drinking. And it's not impossible to develop multiple liver abnormalities from regular drinking, but also breast and colorectal cancer. And there is a direct correlation between the amount of alcohol someone drinks and their

development of cancer. Meaning if you drink 10, this shouldn't surprise anybody, but if you drink one drink a week, you're probably more likely, less likely to develop cancer from alcohol than if you drink 10 drinks a week. That's not a huge surprise. Additionally, alcohol has a uniquely damaging effect on DNA, right? So we know, what are things we know that can damage DNA? Radiation, whether that be from the sun or whether that be from like Chernobyl or, you know, Three Mile Island. We know that things that do a lot of oxidative stress within the body and cause a lot of oxidative damage can damage our DNA. Well, alcohol can do that and it can interfere with the body's ability to recover, which could be a reason why it's also a big time driver in carcinogen when it comes to

cancer development. Something that almost never gets talked about and that I think will be uniquely kind of valuable for this audience, because you guys are so fitness focused, is the effect that heavy drinking can have on weight gain. Okay. So we discussed earlier, and I think it's worth circling back to because I, I did before I did research for this episode, I actually didn't know this, but like I mentioned to you, one alcoholic drink or what we would define as one alcoholic drink is a drink that contains 14 grams of alcohol. That could be a shot, one and a half ounce shot. It could be a five ounce glass of wine. It could be a 12 ounce beer. Those are all going to have about 14 grams of alcohol at seven calories per gram. That's a hundred calories per drink,

no matter what else is in it. That's discounting the carbs from the barley or the rye or the hops from the beer. And that's discounting the sugars and the carbs from the wine. So you're getting all that plus 14 grams, 98 calories just from alcohol. What do you think that's going to do for your body composition if you drink regularly and each drink brings with it an associate of 98, so basically 100 calories? It's going to make a real big difference. It's going to make a really, really big difference in the long run, okay? to make a real big difference. It's going to make a really, really big difference in the long run. Okay. We know that alcohol can have a negative effect on your fitness and physical performance, right? It's going to obviously lead to weight gain if you're consuming too many calories already, but from a nutritional and dietary standpoint, and I told you guys that we would talk about this,

alcohol reduces your inhibitions around food. If it reduces your inhibitions around humans and it reduces your inhibitions around social settings, it will obviously have the capability to reduce your inhibitions around food. And we see this a lot, which is people who start a diet with all the best intentions and they do really good during the day. They get home, they have one drink and boom, all of a sudden they are raiding the pantry. Now this could be from being overly, overly restrictive during the day and having kind of a rebounding effect at night. It could also be that whatever finite amount of willpower you had, when you did decide to start drinking, it knocked your inhibitions just low enough that you began to kind of

be more susceptible to falling off your plan. So there's really no reasonable way to include alcohol in a fat loss program that won't make that's fair? I know a lot of fitness professionals that want to minimize the barrier for people to remain committed to their diet by framing all foods as being disconnected from morality, which is to say there's no such thing as bad foods, which I think is probably true. But there are definitely foods that will make it fucking really hard to lose weight. And alcohol is one of those foods or things. Alcohol will make it uniquely hard because it has calories and because it reduces sleep quality, which will indirectly make it harder to stick to your diet and because it reduces inhibitions, which will

make it directly harder to stick to your diet, which is why the clients who I have worked with that have lost the most weight and been able to keep it off the longest are the fastest and most aggressive when it comes to not necessarily changing their food behavior. Obviously they eat less, but their alcohol behavior, every client I've ever had who did a dry month, pulled alcohol out for a month or 30 days. When they went back to drinking, drank less and lost more weight during that month than any other month that we were in a deficit. So you take the deficit, you standardize it. You've been in a deficit for a year, but only one month you cut out alcohol. That's the month that people lose the most weight.

I see that all the time. And guess what? It's not surprising. So I would say if your goal is body fat reduction and you are in a place where you think you're open to reducing your alcohol consumption, that is a fantastic idea. And it will probably make your weight loss so much, so much easier. So let's talk about sleep. Yes, because alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, it can initially help you fall asleep, but it can also disrupt your sleep later in the night because alcohol can cause your sleep to be lighter and less recuperative. It actually makes it harder to get into rapid eye movement sleep.

We'll talk about that in a second, okay? But we know alcohol makes it perhaps easier to fall asleep, but more likely that you'll experience sleep disruptions and you'll experience greater disruptions, more disruptions when you're drinking. Okay. Alcohol also increases the risk of developing things like deep snoring and even sleep apnea, which can lead to extremely, extremely reduced sleep quality, improper oxygenation of the brain, et cetera. So we know that alcohol can affect your REM sleep or rapid eye movement sleep, which is the sleep stage during which your brain is the most active. That's when you tend to dream and alcohol can cause your brain to spend

less time in REM, which means you are going to have fewer dreams, less vivid dreams, less deep stage sleep. Okay. With less REM sleep means you have shorter durations of that deep sleep period, which is the most recuperative and kind of recoverable type of sleep. So if you don't do that, is it going to be harder to stick to your diet? Absolutely. Is it going to be harder to have good workouts? Absolutely. Is it going to be harder to feel your best throughout the day? Absolutely. So you need to be very aware of how alcohol affects your sleep. Okay. Uh, another thing that I think it's, it is worth talking about, um, when it comes to alcohol consumption, as we kind of wrap this thing up and circle the wagons is the social effects. So alcohol is at the bedrock of a lot of what people do socially. And that can make it really, really hard to simply walk away.

A lot of people feel social and familial pressures to drink. I mean, alcohol is very cultural. I live in Sonoma County where wine drinking is kind of ubiquitous. So being sober and not drinking is actually something that's not as easy as you might think because I'm always in social settings. I do think there's a line to walk there. I think that foregoing all of the social fun and removing alcohol entirely, if it means you can't be social, that that might actually be more negative than not drinking. Because again, all of this exists on like a risk adjusted spectrum. You adjust your drinking habits to what I would describe as your tolerance for risk, knowing that every drink you have increases the risk

of developing some of the negative stuff that we talked about. Okay. So if you know that you can be in a position where maybe you say, Hey, I think one night out where I have one to two drinks and I'm social will be good for my health. It will give me that social belonging. We talked with Dr. Kyle Gillette on the podcast about the pillars of health. And one of those is social. So you can't abandon that. But I do think it's important for all of you to be aware that every time you choose to consume alcohol, even if there is a potentially positive effect from the antioxidants present in the substrate that's being fermented, it's almost assuredly wiped out by the

negative effects. And the more you drink, the more negative those effects become. And I'm often asked how alcohol affects your fitness and how it affects your ability to lose weight. And it's important to remind you that yes, it can cause liver problems. Yes, it can cause various forms of cancer. Yes, it can lead to weight gain, but it can directly affect your sleep, which indirectly affects your fat loss. And it can directly affect your eating behavior, which will obviously very directly affect your fat loss. In addition to the fact that it has calories. So guys, I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you fat loss in addition to the fact that it has calories. So guys, I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you did, I want to make sure that you do me a favor,

leave me a five-star rating and review on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, anywhere you listen to podcasts, share this thing, send it to a friend, send it to a family member. And if you are somebody who is struggling with alcohol consumption, okay. Um, you know, I, there are various different ways to seek help. Okay. But alcohol anonymous appears to be a tried and true alcoholics. Anonymous appears to be a tried and true kind of faith-based 12 step way that you might go about it. You can also call SAMHSA's national helpline at 1-800-662-HELP. This will kind of route you through to the treatment referral service to hopefully help you find treatment

for alcohol use disorder. Wishing you the best of luck on your health and hope you have a happy holiday season.