Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - How Bad Is Alcohol for You, Really?

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

There’s no doubt heavy drinking is a ticket to an early death. The CDC estimates 88,000 Americans die annually from alcohol-related causes, which includes car accidents, a cornucopia of cancers, and liver disease. Fifteen million Americans are believed to have an alcohol dependency disorder, and until recently alcohol killed more people than opioids. That’s not to mention the disastrous effects of alcoholism on quality of life, mental health, productivity, and relationships. Of course, you’ve heard all this before, and don’t need me to tell you heavy drinking can ruin and shorten your life. That said, you’ve also probably heard that moderate drinking is good for you. That’s the claim doctors, scientists, and beverage companies have promoted for years—heavy drinking is bad for you and moderate drinking is beneficial. Now, though, the pendulum is swinging in the other direction after a series of studies emerged that seemed to show alcohol is dangerous in any amount. For example, CNN published an article titled “Even one drink a day could be shortening your life,” in reference to one such study (which you’ll learn about in a moment). Now, the fashionable opinion is that any alcohol is bad for you, full stop, and even moderate drinking is an invitation to long-term health problems. Is this true, though? Are you shortening your life by having a glass or two of wine or beer each night? Well, the simple answer is no, probably not. The more complicated answer is that there’s still a lot we don’t know about the long-term effects of alcohol and there’s no one size fits all answer for how much alcohol you can safely drink. So, what exactly does alcohol do to your body, and how much can you safely drink? Keep listening to learn the answer. --- Mentioned on The Show: Books by Mike Matthews: https://legionathletics.com/products/books/ --- Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.legionathletics.com/signup/

Alcohol. Is it bad for you? Is it good for you? Does it depend on how much? I mean, we all know that too much alcohol is bad, but what about moderate drinking? Is that going to impair health in any way? Is it going to enhance health? Does it blunt muscle gain? That's something I've been asked many times. Does it lead to more fat storage? That's another common question. Those are some of the things we're going to be talking about here. Now, before we get to the show, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please consider picking up one of my best selling health and

fitness books. I have Bigger Leaner Stronger for Men, Thinner Leaner Stronger for Women. I have a flexible dieting cookbook called The Shredded Chef, as well as a 100% practical hands-on blueprint for personal transformation called The little black book of workout motivation. These books have sold well over a million copies and have helped thousands of people build their best body ever. And you can find them on all major online retailers like Amazon, Audible, iTunes, Kobo, and Google play as well as in select Barnes and Noble stores. So again, that's Bigger Leaner Stronger for men, Thinner Leaner Stronger for women, The Shredded Chef, and The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Oh, and I should also mention that you can get any of my audiobooks

for free when you sign up for an Audible account, which is the perfect way to make those little pockets of downtime, like commuting, meal prepping, dog walking, and cleaning, a bit more interesting, entertaining, and productive. And if you want to take Audible up on that offer and get one of my audiobooks for free, just go to legionathletics.com slash A and it'll forward you over and then you can sign up for your account. So let's start with a quick alcohol 101. So this is a drug also known as ethanol. It's produced by fermenting grains and fruits and other carbohydrate containing foods and it contains calories, but those calories are not processed in the same way as food calories. And we're going to talk about that in a minute. Now, alcohol's most immediate

effects are psychological, of course. And as it is a central nervous system depressant, if you have a small-ish amount, it reduces anxiety, it increases sociability, and causes almost like a mild euphoric type of feeling. But if you have too much, then stupor, unconsciousness, and death. Now, I had mentioned that the body processes alcohol differently than food. It processes the calories contained in alcohol differently than in food. So with alcohol, when you drink it, the ethanol is processed by the liver and it turns into a toxic compound called acetaldehyde. Now, because this stuff is very poisonous, the body has to get rid of it as quickly as possible. And it can do that by converting it into another substance called acetate, which it can then convert into carbon dioxide and water. Now, the problem is the body can only process so much ethanol so quickly.

And that accounts for a lot of the negative side effects of drinking too much or too frequently. If you have too much acetaldehyde in your body at any given time, or if you have too much acetaldehyde, maybe not as much as a binge drinking session, but if it's just too much too often, it causes problems in the body. Now, one of the interesting physiological aspects of how the body processes the acetaldehyde is while it's working on clearing it out of its system, it short circuits its processing of dietary fat and carbohydrates. For example, fat oxidation levels plummet. So fat burning plummets when the body is processing acetaldehyde. And so what that means then is if you are eating fatty foods while you're drinking, which many people do eat, fried foods, for example, you are going to store the dietary fat as body fat at an accelerated rate. And so that is why drinking regularly can lead to excess body fatness. If it's combined with a calorie surplus, let's remember that

there's nothing here that can get around energy balance. If you are not consuming more calories than you are burning, you are not going to get fatter by drinking. You might find that your body starts storing fat a bit differently. Like you're probably going to have more visceral fat if you're drinking regularly, and that's not good, but your absolute body fatness, if we want to look at it in terms of total pounds of body fat is not going to change unless you are in a calorie surplus. But if you are regularly in a calorie surplus and regularly drinking alcohol and regularly eating fatty foods, when you're drinking alcohol, you can gain fat quickly. You can increase your total body fatness quickly. Now, the body does not have any way to convert ethanol into body fat. That should also be noted. So alcohol isn't directly making you fatter. If

all you had was some alcohol with no food with it, especially no dietary fat with it, you're not going to get fatter. The body can't do anything with the calories and alcohol other than process them in the way that I described just a couple minutes ago. All right, now let's talk about alcohol and muscle growth. So research shows that moderate drinking, and I'll explain what that is in a minute, is probably not going to get in the way of muscle gain unless maybe it contributes to a lifestyle that gets in the way of muscle gain. So if you stay out late drinking and you're not getting enough sleep, then of course that's going to get in the way, but the alcohol itself probably does not.

However, if you drink too much and too often, then it's going to reduce your testosterone levels. And depending on how significant that effect is, that can certainly get in the way of muscle and strength gain. And studies also show that drinking too much alcohol can interfere with post-workout recovery in several ways and directly interfere with muscle and strength gain. So if you want to get as jacked as possible, you really are going to want to limit your alcohol intake. And again, we'll talk about amounts in a minute. Now, this might be me repeating myself slightly, but I just want to make this point. As far as alcohol and fat loss goes, you can do just fine cutting drinking alcohol so long as it is moderate and so long as you are accounting for

extra calories that are coming with the alcohol. So the calories and the alcohol itself are not an issue, but if you're drinking beer, for example, there are more calories in it than just what comes from the alcohol. And that's pretty much it. Don't drink too much, account for the calories. that's pretty much it. Don't drink too much, account for the calories. And if drinking is leading to overeating, well, then that would be a reason to cut it back or maybe cut it out. Or if it is getting in the way of your workouts because you feel a little bit hungover and when you're supposed to work out the next day, then that could be a reason not to drink. Those are mostly behavioral things. All right. So before we talk a little bit about the health side of drinking alcohol, let's define moderate drinking, something I've said a couple of times. Well, unfortunately, there isn't a

consistent definition out there for what moderate drinking is, but in most countries, it is 30 to 40 grams of alcohol or less per day. So that's one or two servings for men and about half that for women. Now, keep in mind that is grams of alcohol, grams of ethanol, not an alcoholic drink. So beer, for example, is about 5% alcohol generally and wine is about 15%. So if you're having 200 grams of beer, then that's about 10 grams of alcohol and about 30 grams of alcohol if it is wine. So given that definition, given that level of intake, is moderate drinking bad for you? Well, the research is split on this. Some studies have shown that moderate

alcohol consumption has small health benefits and others have shown that moderate alcohol consumption has small health benefits, and others have shown that it has no benefits whatsoever. But the weight of the evidence is that it's probably not bad for you, at least physically speaking. It really depends, of course, how you respond to alcohol. But if we look at it strictly physiologically, moderate drinking does not seem to be bad for your health. So for example, there is a study that was conducted by scientists at the Newfield Department of Clinical Medicine, and they looked at the drinking habits of 12,000 elderly men between 1978 and 1991. And what they found is that the risk of death was lowest among the moderate drinkers. These are people who had one or two drinks per day on average, and it was higher among non-drinkers and people who drank

more than two drinks per day. Other studies have found more or less the same thing as well. So for example, studies conducted by the American Cancer Society, Copenhagen University, and the University of Münster have found that drinking on average one or two, having one or two drinks per day is generally associated with living longer than having no drinks per day or three or more drinks per day. Now, the problem with a lot of that research is that it is merely observational, right? So that can establish correlations. It can suggest there are relationships, but it can't establish causation. It can't explain cause and effect. You can't take those studies and say, see, drinking alcohol makes you healthier. Now, one of the reasons for that is there are a lot of confounding variables in play here. You

have wealth, you have preexistingexisting health issues, you have people who had to stop drinking because they were drinking too much and it was hurting their health. And now they're a non-drinker with impaired health because of all the drinking they used to do. And that's why researchers have taken that line of work further and tried to control for some of those variables. And when you look at that research, you find that the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption mostly disappear. And when you look at the weight of that evidence, I think it's fair to say that the health benefits generally associated with moderate alcohol consumption are completely overblown. For example, one of the largest studies conducted on this matter to date was done by scientists at the

University of Cambridge, and they looked at the drinking habits and the health of over 600,000 people. And what they found is after controlling for confounding variables as well as they could, moderate drinking had more or less no impact on longevity. They also found that when people drank more than 100 grams of alcohol, now remember that's alcohol, not alcoholic drinks, but over 100 grams of alcohol per week, the risk of dying increased. So I think it's fair to say that one to two drinks per day is probably not going to hurt you. It's not going to harm your health, but it's probably also not going to help you. It's not going to give you any noticeable health benefits. Now, as far as evidence-based guidelines for

moderate drinking go, I'll say this. Don't have more than one gram of alcohol per pound of body weight per week. And remember that's a gram of alcohol per pound of body weight per week. And remember, that's a gram of alcohol, not an alcoholic drink per se. And the reason for that is if you have a bigger body, you can safely consume more alcohol than people who have a smaller body. Furthermore, don't have more than a quarter of a gram of alcohol, so 0.25 grams of alcohol per pound of body weight on any single day. And if you do, make sure that you cut back on subsequent days to stay within the limit of one gram per pound of body weight per week. Don't get drunk more than a few times per year because a lot of the negative effects

associated with drinking alcohol are when you binge drink repeatedly or chronically drink too much. So have a high daily intake of alcohol. And also I would say aim to stay below the guidelines that I just shared. Treat those as maximums, not as recommended levels of intake. Like don't go above those and ideally stay beneath them. I would say, as much as you can. And it should also be said that if you can't do that, if you can't drink moderately, as I've just laid it out, don't drink at all. It's really going to be better if you just stay away from alcohol. Just completely abstain. All right. Well, that's it for today's episode i hope you found it interesting and helpful and if you did and you don't mind doing me a favor could you please leave a quick

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All right. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.