Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 360: Alcohol and Long-Term Health

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

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Hey, everybody, welcome into another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And in today's episode, we will be discussing again on the podcast, the interconnectedness and the relationship, if you will, between alcohol consumption and health. This is, in actuality, something I've been interested in for a very, very long time, probably since before I even got into exercise specifically. I was pretty fascinated by the way in which alcohol can impact our health. I started my interest in the health space with a pretty strange early onset fascination with nutrition. And one of the things that always blew my mind when I was younger was kind of the blissful ignorance we have collectively around alcohol and how it can impact our health. This has been

something that I've been very vocal about on social media, which is admittedly oftentimes misconstrued as me being puritanical. I'm certainly far from perfect. And while I do not drink, I do not engage in exclusively healthy habits. And I'm not, you know, one to spout a bunch of condemnation at anybody who does enjoy alcohol. My hope for the discussion today is that we can have the entry point to a series of several podcasts about the ways alcohol can affect your health and hopefully unfold some really cool information that will help you make better, more informed decisions if you choose to incorporate alcohol in your healthy lifestyle or your journey to a healthier lifestyle. This is all things that I am doing in preparation for a talk I will be

giving in Las Vegas on March 11th and 12th at the Real Coaches Summit, which I'm very excited to present at. Again, that presentation will be specifically on this topic. So if you enjoy this episode, definitely come join me in Vegas. Link up, let's chat. I'd love to talk to you about your coaching business, your training business, your fitness goals, whatever. I know many of you will be at the event. You're excited to meet. I'm excited to meet you. There's tons of other amazing speakers. It's cool to get to do stuff like this. So that is coming up in March. And you can expect a number of podcasts on this topic as we get closer to that, because I am doing the deepest dive I've really ever done on alcohol's impact on health. But today will be a relatively simple discussion about pros, cons, risks, short-term and long-term

effects, athletic performance, informed decision-making, alternatives, etc. So enjoy the episode, folks, and thanks for tuning in. This episode is brought to you in part thanks to some of our amazing partners like LMNT. LMNT makes the best electrolyte product on the market. In fact, I've actually started drinking my LMNT each and every morning before I have coffee so as to optimize my circadian biology, make sure that I'm hydrated, and make sure that I'm getting ahead on my water intake throughout the day and not reliant on stimulants, but instead being somebody who's reliant on hydration and the proper balance of minerals and electrolytes. If you want to feel your best all day, mentally and physically,

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I looking to take your fitness to the next level. My favorite flavors are definitely the raspberry and citrus. When I put a box together, I try to load up on raspberry and citrus. And when you put your box together, you can get a free sample pack containing all of Elements' amazing flavors like mango chili, citrus, raspberry, orange, and more. To get access to this free gift with purchase, scroll down to the show notes and check out using the special link for Dynamic Dialogue listeners. Let's begin the episode first and foremost again with just the reiteration that I truly do not care whether or not you choose to drink socially, whether or not you choose to drink regularly, and I'm rather empathetic if you drink compulsively

and out of addiction. I have seen essentially every single way in which alcohol can wreck your life. I'm familiar with the effect of chronic alcohol consumption with alcoholism and even alcohol-related disease in my family. So I'm seriously very empathetic, and I want to make sure that you guys are aware. I am just trying to bring you the data. I will, of course, have an opinion. My opinion is not gospel. It's simply my opinion. But when we talk about alcohol, I think it's important to just immediately start with some statistics, start with some information, and go from there. So each year in the United States, specifically, excessive alcohol use is responsible for 140,000 deaths by shortening lifespan on average, this is in excessive alcohol consumers, by 26 years. Alcohol is responsible for one in five deaths among adults ages 20 to 49. And alcohol costs $249 billion in economic costs

or approximately $2.05 per drink. That's pretty considerable. Now now alcohol use is also very tightly correlated with many chronic health issues the first of which is high blood pressure also known as hypertension that is very common and of course it is unfair to say that alcohol causes high blood pressure, but it is correlated with high blood pressure, right? Somebody who engages in regular alcohol consumption may also engage in other behaviors that may elevate blood pressure. Stress elevates blood pressure, and many people use alcohol as a buffer for stress, but hypertension is very serious and alcohol consumption is correlated very closely with hypertension. Alcohol is also correlated very closely with heart disease and stroke. Binge drinking, heavy drinking, excessive drinking, even average amounts of

drinking can lead to or exacerbate heart disease, including things like cardiomyopathy, which is literal death and disease of the muscle, the cardiac tissue of the heart. It can cause things like irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, and stroke. Now, when it comes to the more obvious dangers of alcohol consumption, one thing that most people are fairly clear about and fairly familiar with are the effects that alcohol has on your liver. You might be familiar with terms like cirrhosis, hepatitis, things that when we hear that, we think, oh, that must be about the liver. And the liver is responsible for doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the body, specifically regarding detoxification. And alcohol works because it is a toxic substance. The reason you get the effect you get from alcohol is essentially from a low-level poisoning effect.

It's not to say that it's not enjoyable. I enjoy a good buzz as much as anybody. However, it definitely takes a toll on your liver because of the detoxification requirement in an environment where there are other toxins present. If the only thing your liver had to do was detoxify alcohol, it might not take the toll it takes in the environment we live in, where you have other things that need to be done by the liver. And the liver is heavily taxed with regular consumption of alcohol and excessive alcohol intake is extremely damaging to the liver and can lead to things like fatty liver disease. This is also known as steatosis, hepatitis, fibrosis, and and cirrhosis so you are at greater risk for four different forms of

liver illness or disease if you engage in regular alcohol consumption these statistics are important i'm not using them to scare you i just think they are worth hearing and worth laying the floor we will discuss you know what amounts or dosages of alcohol may be safe. Again, everything I'm reading to you now, everything we are discussing now is specific to dosages of alcohol that are considered to be excessive. So let's start with this framework of that maybe being two drinks a day or more. Okay. Something that many of you are also quite familiar with, with, uh, regards to alcohol and its impact on health is cancer, specifically drinking alcoholic beverages of any kind. This means wine. This means beer. This means hard liquor. There is no benefit to

drinking wine, uh, because it has resveratrol and antioxidants in that that benefit is wildly outweighed by the ethanol, the actual alcohol in the beverage. It doesn't matter if it's a wheat beer, a barley beer, a grape-based wine, if it's agave-based tequila. If it has ethanol and you are consuming that in a certain dosage, that ethanol is carcinogenic. And alcohol consumption is specifically linked to increased prevalence of oral cancer, throat cancer, larynx or voice box cancer, cancer of the esophagus, cancer of the colon, breast cancer in women specifically. There is breast cancer in men.

in women specifically, there is breast cancer in men. However, that said, alcohol consumption, to my knowledge, does not enhance that prevalence, as well as cancer of the rectum, and of course, circling back to the liver, cancer of the liver. So, throat, mouth, larynx, esophagus, mouth, larynx, esophagus, colon, rectum, liver. That is seven different types of cancer. And if you are a female, you can add in breast cancer to this mix. The less alcohol a person drinks, this is important, the lower the risks of these types of cancers. So this is one of those correlatives where we go, hmm, okay, we see a positive correlation where in which the more people drink, the more they develop these things and the less people drink, the less prevalent these things are. Okay. Now something worth noting from a more kind of interpersonal thing. All right. This is just kind of getting to the

rounding out landscape of the alcohol statistics. More than 40% of people who died violently had alcohol in their bloodstream. Any of you who work in law enforcement or who are familiar with some of the statistics around domestic violence and home-specific violence are likely not surprised by this at all. Of course, alcohol is tightly correlated with motor vehicle crashes, motor vehicle deaths, falls that result in deaths, drownings, accidental burns, and of course, increased prevalence of home-specific violence, as well as homicide, suicide, and sexual assault. Alcohol also contributes to a substantial amount of overdose-related deaths and toxicity-related deaths and poisoning usually because it has a negative interaction with other compounds. Okay. So those are the kind of things that one can expect from consistent,

regular, lifelong alcohol consumption. This is not an opinion. This is not me trying to spin it negatively. These are the health effects of consistent, regular alcohol consumption. Now, are you guaranteed to develop all of these illnesses, all of these diseases, all of these different abnormalities, anomalies, and issues if you drink a regular amount of alcohol. And I would say probably not. However, for every amount of alcohol that you consume, okay, so let's just say for every standard drink you consume, and this is a very important statistic, a standard drink in the United States contains 0.6 ounces or 14 grams or 1.2 tablespoons of pure alcohol.

Okay, pure alcohol is ethanol, which is generally a byproduct of the fermentation that we see when we produce many of our favorite alcoholic beverages. You're going to get approximately 0.6 ounces of alcohol or 14 grams, if you will, in a 12 ounce beer. That's a normal size beer. For those of you who are thinking of like a beer where you crack the, uh, the kind of, uh, foil top off, or you like, you know, you pop the like soda style can that those are both examples of 12 ounce spears and eight ounce malt liquor. Uh, this is not a fairly commonly consumed alcoholic beverage, but that also contains 14 grams of alcohol. And it's important to note that a 12 ounce beer that is 5% alcohol is considered a standard drink. If it is seven and a half percent alcohol, you can consider that a 1.5 standard drink because

we're adding 50% more alcohol that is going to ratchet up the percentage. Eight ounces of malt liquor at 7% ABV or alcohol by volume is a standard drink. Five ounces of wine. That's a very small amount at 12% alcohol content is a standard drink or 1.5 ounces of 80 proof, that's 40% ABV, of distilled spirits. So think gin, rum, vodka, whiskey, tequila, et cetera. The easiest way to kind of break this down is as follows. One beer, one normal size glass of wine, one shot. Okay. Those are one standard drink. Okay. One beer equals a standard drink. One glass of wine equals a standard drink. One shot equals a standard drink. Okay. I believe that if you consume one standard drink per day, you will definitely increase your risk of developing all of the things I mentioned. If you consume one to two standard

drinks sporadically in social settings spaced far enough apart, you might not experience any of these issues, but your risk profile will increase with every drink. I think the name of the game for drinking in a way that is healthful and in a way that is social is to take these instances in which you engage with alcohol and space them out and try to surround them with other things that are healthful like exercise, better nutrient-dense food selection, and of course, the social enrichment that we often get from drinking. The positive effect of being social when we drink, being around other people when we drink is very beneficial for our health. That's why I'm always cautious about saying, oh, just quit drinking. Because maybe when you go out and have one standard drink a week,

which is probably not enough to cause issues, one drink a day for a week will. But let's say you just go out and you have one to two beers once a week with people that you're close with and you have a very enjoyable social time. I would imagine that even though there's going to be a marginal increase in risk for all the things we just discussed, the likelihood of that quality of life increasing from all of that social stuff, that scheduled social stuff, there will be a trade-off there that may very well be worth it. Okay. But it's important to note that the amount of drinking that is considered to be excessive, that will not ensure, but very much puts you in this likelihood or in this cohort that is

probably going to see issues is for for women, about eight drinks per week. That's one a day, basically. And for men, 15 or more drinks per week, about two a day. And so I would say that if you are consuming one serving or less a day of alcohol, your risk profile is increased, but you're not excessive. And for men, it's two. Women, it's one. For men, it's two. You have to think though, that when we talked about serving size, if your five ounce wine slowly becomes a seven and a half ounce wine, and let's say you're a woman, that is now a 1.5 drink per day. and that is going to increase your risk profile considerably. Taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit about my coaching company,

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So it is important to note that we have some data that points us in the exact direction of just how much alcohol is bad for health. And for women, it's literally one drink a day. And for men, it's about two. That said, you will still see some pretty serious negative effects from daily alcohol consumption, in my opinion, even if it is only one drink. Even though for a man, one drink might put you below the line that is considered to be excessive. I do think there are other issues that can arise, and we'll start to kind of unpack and talk about those. I think the first thing that immediately comes to mind with regular alcohol consumption is calorie intake. The more alcohol you drink, in all likelihood, the more calories you are going to consume not only from alcohol, but from the reduction in inhibition that

is so frequently associated with alcohol. The more you drink, the more you are likely to eat. That said, it's not a guarantee, but I would imagine that most people who drink oftentimes increase their food intake during that drinking period. And when you look at some of the diseases that we did not talk about that are very concerning from a public health standpoint, specifically obesity and diabetes, we know there's a greater correlation with more alcohol consumption than the development of these issues. And I think it has mostly to do with increased caloric intake. You know, we know alcohol is a carcinogen, so, you know, we're not shocked that it causes cancer. However, you know, when people think of

like high calorie foods, they tend to think of like cheeseburgers and French fries and pizza and donuts, but they don't often think of alcohol, which is very calorically rich from a gram per gram or ounce by ounce basis. You know, many of these beverages have carbohydrates, which contribute energy to the product, but they also contain alcohol, which has seven calories per gram. And we just actually talked about this earlier. The average standard drink in America contains 0.6 ounces or 14 grams of pure alcohol. So if you have 14 grams of alcohol in your drink, that's a lot of calories coming from alcohol. Every gram of alcohol has seven calories. So that's 98 calories just from the alcohol

in a standard beverage. Every standard alcoholic beverage, basically a hundred calories before you count the sugar, before you count the carbohydrates, before you count any of the other mixers that someone might put into a cocktail. So there is a considerable amount of calories entering the diet for like consistent regular drinkers, which is why I think so many people have a much easier time losing weight when they stop drinking. Not only do they make better food decisions, but they eliminate a huge swath of calories. I mean, even if you're just drinking two drinks a day as a man, and let's say it's, you know, you're just taking shots of vodka. So it's, let's call it a hundred calories a shot.

That's 1400 calories you would eliminate every week just by giving up drinking. If you were drinking that two times per day at that threshold for excessive use. And, you know, I don't even want to begin to guess how many calories you might remove from the diet from kind of just, you know, eating. I do think there is a transient shift in terms of food intake. I think it becomes more prevalent, more, you know, less inhibited. The more you drink, the more you eat kind of thing. Now, another thing that I think really matters when we talk about alcohol consumption and general health, right? We've talked about pretty much everything public health and disease so far, but when we talk about general health, it's sleep. Alcohol seems to have a really negative

impact on sleep. Specifically, I think it does a pretty good job of obliterating your REM sleep into basically nothing. Alcohol makes it very hard to get deep, restful sleep. Now, it might knock you out because alcohol does have a fairly noticeable sedative effect. It will mellow you out. It will help you probably fall asleep. It might even black you out if you drink too much. A lot of you who are, you know, let's call it regular party animals, so to speak. Any of you who have had the pleasure of blacking out from getting drunk will know that you can wake up hours later and completely entirely unaware of what the hell happened and be completely shocked that you've just been out for like eight, nine, 10 hours. shocked that you've just been out for like eight, nine, 10 hours. So, you know, I am very aware that the right amount of alcohol can quote unquote knock you out. But in general, alcohol has a negative effect on the quality of your sleep. And for many of you, that's very important. Your sleep matters because you care about your mental wellbeing, which we'll talk about in a

second with alcohol. Your sleep matters because you care about your mental wellbeing, which we'll talk about in a second with alcohol. Your sleep matters because you care about your physical performance, which we'll talk about in a second with alcohol. You know, your sleep matters because it is clearly the case that a decreased, you know, nightly sleep bank, so to speak, is again, correlated with a bunch of shit you probably don't want to deal with when you get older or as you age, right? So if alcohol is all but essentially guaranteed to wreck your sleep, I think it's the kind of situation where you need to make informed decisions and trade-offs. And I think a lot of people want to know how to do this because they do enjoy alcohol consumption. And I can't say for sure how much alcohol will affect your sleep the way I can some of this other stuff because I don't have the data in front of me. But I would imagine that, as is

the case with a lot of this stuff, if any amount of alcohol is enough to cause disruption, like let's say it's one drink per week for a woman is enough to cause a lot of these other negative effects. I'm imagining that one drink might also negatively affect your sleep. But I would say that it is not necessarily going to make it so that you can't fall asleep, but it will decrease the quality of the sleep you are getting, which is very important. Okay. Let's talk about mental health because that's another thing that many of you are getting, which is very important. Okay. Let's talk about mental health, because that's another thing that many of you are very, very concerned about. And alcohol is definitely closely connected to our mental health and wellbeing. I think that alcohol can be in a

mood elevator for sure. You know, we think about it as a social lubricant. A lot of people like the feeling of being buzzed and they certainly don't feel any issues when they're buzzed. It's not like they drink and feel depression or they drink and feel anxiety. And many people drink and feel the opposite of these things. However, anytime you begin using a substance, there will be changes to your physiology, especially when it is a substance that acts on your neurology the way alcohol does. play a role in mood disorders like anxiety and depression. It can make them worse if you already have them. It can make them present or more present if you have not had them very often. And I think a lot of you are probably not drinking so much that it's causing these issues or exacerbating these issues. But if you do deal with these issues, ask yourself the question, are they better or are they worse, you know, after drinking, not during drinking, but after drinking,

or is my anxiety and depression any better or any worse after drinking? And I would imagine that for a lot of you, you'll probably notice, Hmm, I think those, those feelings of emotions, those challenges think those feelings, those emotions, those challenges, the battle with my mental health that so many people are dealing with, it is harder when I am drinking more regularly. And so, you know, when we talk about public health, we talk about disease risk, we talk about economic cost, we talk about things like domestic violence, automotive issues, all this stuff, right? But when we talk about, you know, at the individual level, personal like health, sleep is huge. Mood is huge. And I believe alcohol does have a pretty negative effect on both of these things when it is consumed regularly. Another thing that a lot of you care about because you're listening

to my fitness podcast and you follow me on my various different social medias where we talk about fitness and nutrition and training is your athletic performance. And I think alcohol can impair athletic performance indirectly by messing with your sleep and messing with your mood. It can make your alcohol, you know, alcohol can make your athletic performance worse by virtue of contributing too many calories to the diet and making it hard to maintain the optimal weight for whatever it is you're looking to perform at. You know, there's a lot of ways alcohol can disrupt your athletic performance indirectly. But I think directly, it does it by causing dehydration and by impairing muscle recovery.

Too much alcohol, again, how much is hard to say. But let's say for men, it's two drinks or more. And for women, it's one drink or more. Just for fair play, we're going to try to work off that same dosage. I would imagine that your ability to recover from a challenging workout will be increasingly impaired every, like, let's say, oh man, what is the terminology here? Every standard deviation, you go above that threshold. So for women, if you go from one drink to one and a quarter drinks to one and a half drinks to two drinks to three drinks, for men, if it's two drinks to two and a half to three, every standard deviation, you go up

every amount of alcohol you increase. I would anticipate a reduction in muscle recovery and a reduction in hydration. Those are things that might not matter that much to you in the longterm. However, I would imagine that they matter quite a bit to you in the long term. However, I would imagine that they matter quite a bit to you in the short term, in between sessions, making the most of your sessions, getting the gains that you're after. And so I think that from a personal health standpoint, if you are a fitness focused person, if you're interested in weight loss, if you're interested in improving your physique or your athletic performance, knowing that alcohol is negatively affecting your sleep, it's negatively affecting your ability to recover from your training at high dosages, and it very well may be the case that it is messing with your

mood, it might be worth making some decisions about what frequency and what dosages you want to engage with alcohol. Another thing that I think is important to remember when it comes to alcohol is actually the ABV, the alcohol by volume and optimizing for things that aren't necessarily always as high ABV as possible. You can find a light beer that has a little less alcohol. That might make it easier to enjoy it more frequently than, say, just slamming back shots of whiskey that's 40% alcohol by volume. So that matters. health is alcohol like inextricably connected to your social life. And for a lot of you, it probably is. You know, I married into a Mexican family where it's like, dude, everybody is fucking drinking all the time for every thing. One year old birthday party, people are fucking hammered. You know, like eight year old birthday party, people are hammered

just coming over on Friday. Oh, 5 PM. The drinks are out. It is very normal for people to drink in large amounts because of the familial or cultural dynamics that they are either born into, married into, or exist in. And you don't have 100% control over that stuff. That's why when we talk about regulating your food consumption and your alcohol consumption, it's always a good idea to zoom out and look at the whole picture. And I think for a lot of you, you're in a situation where socially and culturally, you can't bring alcohol to zero, even if you want to. It might be a generally good idea to drink less, but for you, it's not always practical. And that's where you might have to lean into alternatives like alcohol-free options. There are many better alcohol-free products on the market than there were like

10 years ago. They're saying now young people are drinking less and less than ever. Maybe that's because there's increased legality of alternative substances like cannabis that may present as a great alternative for some. But I think in general, you have to weigh the disease and public health risk of excessive drinking versus the personal and performance risk of regular drinking and the cultural benefit, the social benefit of engaging and being in environments where people are drinking. I think it's pretty clear to me that one drink a week is bad for you. For most people, two drinks a week is, or I'm sorry, one drink a day is probably not good for you. Two drinks a day is borderline excessive. Three

drinks a day is quite dangerous. You know, and for men, it's more than 15 a week. And for women, it's more than eight a week, which is really not a lot when you look at the way so many people drink. Uh, and how are you going to manage that? How are you going to balance that out? You know, you can't just be like, oh, I'm going to save all of my drinks for Saturday, all eight of my drinks that I can have in a week. And I'm going to have eight at once. That is unique in that that classifies as a binge drinking event. And one binge drinking event is actually more dangerous than chronic excessive alcohol consumption. It's strange just how damaging a binge drinking event can be. That opens the door not only for all of these diseases and issues, but also alcohol poisoning,

alcohol-related brain damage, all kinds of stuff happens when you start to teeter into the, I'm not going to have any alcohol, but then when I do drink, I drink way too much. That can be very dangerous. So much like junk food, I think it is imperative as you look to just have a different relationship with alcohol, or if you want to drink less, or if you want to know how much you should drink, to probably start somewhere around a drink a day and maybe two drinks in a social setting, taking as many days in between or as many days as possible to abstain or abstaining when you can. I truly don't think any amount of regular alcohol consumption is good for you. I think that there are small amounts of regular alcohol consumption that will not affect your

performance, your mood, and your sleep. But I think if you are closing in on those amounts that are considered to be excessive, which looking at the data we have now is a lot smaller than what people would have considered, you know, eight drinks a week doesn't seem excessive, but that's the classification. And for men, 15 drinks a week, that probably doesn't sound bad, but I know a lot of people who are hitting at least two beers a day, at least. And it's like, if you ask them, hey, do you think you're an excessive drinker? They're like, no, I drink a normal amount. And maybe you can live your whole life drinking like that and not have problems, but the data doesn't appear to show that. So I think that there's lots to take into

consideration when you look to change, manage or modify your habits and behaviors. But alcohol is one of those ones that I think really makes sense to adjust and modify because of how little it takes to make a negative effect. All right, guys, that will do it for the first episode here. We will, I will probably drop multiple different episodes specifically on this topic. As you know, I put this presentation together for this event. I want to share some of this information with you guys.

I think it's very valuable for your health, performance, and productivity. And I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, be sure to tag me. Let me know what you think. Share it with somebody. I'd love to hear your feedback. And I will catch you on the next episode.