WHOOP Podcast - Does One Less Drink Matter? How Timing and Quantity of Alcohol Affects Your Biometric Data

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

Emily Capodilupo, WHOOP SVP of Data Science & Research, joins Will Ahmed to share recently analyzed data on alcohol consumption patterns and what we see happen to the body physiologically with each and every drink. Emily shares what we're trying to achieve with recovery (2:28), the negative effects of alcohol on recovery (3:46), the effect of every incremental drink on recovery (5:32), the differences between men and women when it comes to alcohol consumption (7:48), holiday drinking (11:44), which month has the highest reports of alcohol consumption (14:11), consumption relative to bedtime - and what happens physiologically (14:54), and drinking hacks to optimize recovery if you do decide to drink (17:53).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello, folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast where we sit down with top athletes, researchers, scientists, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak. And what you can do to unlock your own best performance, I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop. And we are on a mission to unlock human performance. That's right. This week's episode, we're talking about alcohol. That's right. Boos. If you use Whoop, you probably have seen how drinking alcohol can hurt recovery. But we have some new and interesting data that shows just how much every drink can affect you. This is a fascinating conversation.

I sat down with Emily Capitaluco or SVP of Data Science and Research to break down all the data and really to ask her how alcohol affects our bodies. Emily shares the negative effect of alcohol and recovery, how every additional drink affects your physiology. The differences in data between men and women. The uptick of alcohol consumption around the holidays and which month has the highest alcohol consumption. How alcohol consumption relative to bedtime can affect you. And this might be the most important. The hacks you need to know to optimize for your best recovery with drinking.

So what are the hacks that can help you overcome the negative impacts of alcohol? If you're a new WOOP member signing up for WOOP, we've got a special deal for you. Use the code Will W-I-L when you check out to get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. We just dropped a new line of summer bright bands. Definitely worth a look. And you can use the credit on battery packs, whoop body apparel, and more. So head to join.wop.com to get started. Also, if you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at whoop.com or call us 508-443-495-2, and we will answer your questions on a future episode. Without further ado, here is Emily Capital Lupo.

Okay, Emily, welcome back to the Whoop podcast. I am excited to go deep with you on alcohol. Thanks for having me. So many people, I think, observe that alcohol negatively affects their recovery, which is what we're going to explore in great detail. Let's start with a very simple question, which is just how is recovery calculated? Sure.

So in order to talk about how we calculate recovery, it makes sense to talk about what we're trying to achieve with recovery. So recovery measures how ready your body is to respond to training, how ready it is to convert that training into a fitness gain. And one of the things that people don't realize is that, depending on the state that your body is in, the same workout can result in very different. different gains to fitness, gains to performance, you know, if you're in like a state that's

ready to receive that workout versus if you're in a more rundown state and like less ready to action that workout. And so the ROI on that workout varies tremendously. And the way that we capture this is by looking at things like heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep, respiratory rate. And then in a recent update, we also added things like temperature and pole socks to the recovery score. And so all of these different metrics that we're measuring continuously throughout your sleep,

we're able to interpret in terms of what that means for how ready your body is to respond to training or to perform today. Recovery is a metric that's going to summarize your body's readiness.

This obviously has reflections on workouts, as reflections on how you may perceive your overall performance throughout the day cognitively. Now let's talk about alcohol. Why would alcohol negatively impact your recovery score.

So as much fun as alcohol is, it's also a poison. And so whenever we poison ourselves or sort of put things in our body that aren't good for it, our body responds by trying to get this thing out of our body. And so we put a lot of physiological resources behind eliminating the alcohol. And then all of those resources are essentially not available for other things like performing and, you know, functioning optimally. Additionally, when we go to bed drunk, instead of all of the important active processes of sleep that help us recover and get into a good place to be well recovered the next day, we're sort of spending those resources on recovering from the alcohol, you know, eliminating that from our system. And so we tend to have much lower quality sleep. And so even though many of us have experience, like, you know, you have a couple of drinks and then you pass out and you actually, you know, sleep really well, it's more like a sedated sleep than a active sleep and active sleep. sleep is what's really good for you. And so by being sedated instead of, you know, achieving these

important physiological functions throughout the night, you wake up, even if you had, you know, many, many hours of sleep, having had very low quality sleep, and so that results in being less ready to take on the day. Yeah. I mean, I think the fascinating thing for WOOP data and recovery is not just that state of drunkenness, which you described, but even just the one drink, two drink, three drink range and how that starts to negatively affect your body. So the first theme, as I understand it, that you all analyzed, Emily, of course, leads our whole data science team, is looking at every incremental drink how dramatically that affected recovery. What did you find? Each incremental drink makes your recovery go down about 4.2% lower recovery per drink. And keep in mind,

this is on average. There's a lot of inter-individual variability here. So we saw like, you know, just one drink, the effect is relatively small. But when you go all the way up to like having 10 or more drinks, which is the maximum amount that we're calculating, you start to see things like, you know, really, really dramatic changes in, you know, in recovery. And of course, in the inputs to recovery. So in things like HRV where you're losing, you know, 20 milliseconds off your HRV. You know, same thing with resting heart rate, which tends to. climb, you know, the difference between, you know, one drink, your resting heart rate goes up about two beats, but when you're talking about 10 or more drinks, your resting heart rates

going up like 14 beats per minute. So it's a really, really dramatic, you know, steep incline as the drinks increase. Yeah, I mean, to summarize this, and this is averages of averages, so take that with a grain of salt, but roughly 61 HRV on average at zero drinks, and then at at 1, it's at 59. At 2, it's at 56. At 3, it's a 53. At 4, it's at 50. And then all the way down to 10, it's at 36. So someone who would normally have an HRV of 61, all of a sudden, seeing this dramatic reduction in their core, HRV. Resting heart rate following a very similar trend. 56 average at zero, climbing 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 655, 65. 66, all the way up to 69 after 10 drinks.

I mean, it's fascinating to me how linear it is. I think some people perceive zero drinks, one drinks, same thing. Zero, you know, one drink or three drinks, kind of the same thing. It's almost like in binary terms. They have few too many drinks or they just had a couple drinks and it wasn't a big deal. But this actually, this data really shows you that every incremental drink is negatively impacting your body, which I think is pretty fascinating. It's a very linear scale.

I noticed that we analyzed this by men and women. Why don't you describe whether gender affects this trend at all? Well, it was interesting to see that it doesn't that much. So the slopes were pretty similar. Of course, women tend to start with slightly higher-resting heart rates with slightly lower heart rate variability. And so you see the line starting a little bit separated, but they maintain the same separation.

So it suggests that, you know, each incremental drink is affecting them similarly, which is actually not super consistent with, you know, some of the existing academic literature out there about how men and women respond to drinks. One of the things that we hypothesize is behind this is that because this study is like a retrospective analysis of the data, so we weren't telling people how much to drink. We were just observing what happened when they drank. You're seeing a huge selection bias. And so one of the reasons why, like, you know, you'll typically. here that like women are more sensitive to alcohol is because on average we're a lot smaller. And so, you know, the women here who are having 10 plus drinks are probably not average size women. Like I'm pretty sure that I would die before I got to 10. So I'm never going to collect

that data. So like I'm not, you know, contributing to that. And so I think like because there's a huge selection bias and, you know, in terms of like who the people are who are having those really high numbers of drinks, you're going to see slightly different dynamics than if you were controlling for things like age and like BMI or weight or something like that in looking at this data. So you do have to take this with a bit of a grain of salt. And, you know, there's a lot of factors that are going to determine how you as an individual are going to respond to alcohol. And those things are like prior alcohol exposure. So, you know, everybody's probably, everybody who drinks has experienced this, but sort of like the more you drink, the more it takes for you to get drunk.

you can kind of get used to it because your body will upregulate the production of like the enzymes that break it down. Also just like your size and then of course the different behaviors that you have around drinking. So if you're alternating your alcohol with water, if you're eating food along the way, like you're going to metabolize the alcohol very, very differently. A lot of those things are going to affect this data pretty dramatically. Let's talk for a second about just the WOOP members tracking alcohol. What trends have we seen about the population tracking alcohol? What trends have we seen about the population tracking alcohol. I understand alcohol consumption is one of the most popular things to track in the Woop Journal. Yeah, so almost half of all WOOP members are tracking alcohol. And among those who do track

alcohol, on average, they're drinking two nights a week. There were some really surprising trends. So we looked at alcohol consumption by state across the U.S. And there was a pattern with Nebraska, Indiana, and Illinois, and Ohio are drinking the most. I don't know that that's what I would have guest, but it was interesting to see that. Not terribly different from surrounding states, but that was definitely a bit of a Midwestern hotspot. It was also interesting, although not surprising, to see that not only do the most people drink on Saturday, but they also drink the most drinks on Saturday. So just to put that in perspective, on average, 2.7 drinks on Monday night versus 3.6 drinks on Saturday night. Right. And that felt very consistent with the different

between, you know, having a glass of wine or a beer with dinner versus, like, going to a bar. I thought this was interesting. 8 p.m. is the most popular time for members to report stopping alcohol consumption. Yeah. So what I took away from that is that most people are drinking with dinner as opposed to sort of that college kind of like, you know, going out and like having a wild night of drinking and partying and different things like that. So most of this alcohol does appear to be sort of surrounding meal time, which felt like that made sense. Let's talk about alcohol and holidays, because you recently published data in Frontiers, which is a notable journal, and found that sleep and alcohol use were significantly different

from baselines on the majority of U.S. public holidays. Essentially, we observed that people drink more on holidays. Yeah, so not super surprising. We saw that alcohol consumption is much, much higher on holidays and, you know, higher on the holidays you might expect like New Year's Thanksgiving and Christmas than on, you know, some of the like bank holidays, like Labor Day, President's Day and things like that. You know, there's some interesting seasonal effects going on there too, like all throughout December, you know, in the winter, which tends to be, you know, there's a high concentration of holidays. People are drinking more than they are, you know, in like January and February. You know, what we saw is that people

are getting significantly less sleep. They're going to bed later. They're sleeping in later and they're drinking more. And so, you know, one of the things that we thought was interesting about this data from a public health perspective is that it really highlights that when you see this massive increase in, you know, people who are drinking and drinking significantly and therefore likely to be hung over the next day. And then on top of being hung over, they're sleep deprived.

You know, it might want to make you want to think a little bit about, you know, should you be getting behind the wheel and driving the next day, you know, especially for, you know, young or inexperienced drivers, it's probably a good day not to be on the road because those are, you know, a really dangerous recipe for motor vehicle accidents. In fact, there's a lot of data around what happens on daylight savings when we lose that hour of sleep and motor vehicle accidents go up tremendously. And so when you combine the reduced sleep at a population level, the fact that This was overwhelmingly evident across such a large group of people. I mean, we looked at over 10 million sleeps, you know, and 5.8 million reports of alcohol.

When you look at all of this data and you see that like the whole country is drunk, the whole country is sleep deprived, you know, you really do want to think about what you're doing the next day. So holidays with the highest magnitude changes in sleep and alcohol use were New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, interestingly, Emily, the night before Thanksgiving, I believe, has the highest number of DUIs in the country. Let's talk just over the course of the year. What month has the most drinking? So December has the most drinking, and it's very interesting when you think about the whole culture around New Year's resolutions, because then January has the least. So it feels like there's a little bit of, you know, celebrating and getting it out.

and then we're sort of well-behaved in January and then it, you know, kind of creeps up from there. Now, one thing I've observed over the years with my own WOOP data is just the profound difference that alcohol has on my body, depending on when I drink alcohol. Namely, a drink at 5 p.m. versus a drink at 8 p.m. just has a wildly different effect on my next day recovery. Can you speak a little bit to that and what we're seeing in the data? Yeah, so the data is extremely clear. The same amount of alcohol, you know, if you have it like you said, 5 p.m. 8 p.m. is going to have a much, much smaller effect on your recovery score than if you're going to bed drunk. So having it, you know, 10, 11, 12 p.m. And so we looked at the data relative to bedtime. So we normalized it all based on when you ended up eventually going to sleep. And what we saw is like if you just take resting heart rate. So the average resting heart rate for somebody who's drinking, nine hours before bed is 57 beats per minute. But when you take that all the way up to like right before bed, it's 62. So the difference in those just a couple of hours in terms of like when you're drinking relative to bedtime can explain a difference in your heart rate of, you know, five, six beats per minute.

And then you see the same thing in HRV where if you're drinking, say, five hours before bedtime, you're seeing an average HRV of 57.3. And if you're drinking like in that last hour before sleep, the average HRV is 49 milliseconds. And so physiologically, what's going on here is if you drink earlier in the day, you still have the physiological effects of the poison of alcohol and sort of all of those wasted resources that go to clearing out the alcohol as opposed to other healthy physiological processes. But you're totally sober by the time you go to bed.

And so you're able to have a normal night's sleep and use all the active processes of sleep to help boost, your recovery. Versus if you're going to bed drunk, now not only do you have like, you know, all of the poison of the alcohol that your body still needs to clear out, but because you're drunk when you're sleeping, you're more sedated than you are asleep. And so you don't get that same beneficial like result of having a good sleep after the drinking. And you basically have like way lower quality sleep. And so you get this kind of double whammy. And so that's why it's really important. The like, you know, if you're going to drink, making sure that you do stop or

enough that you have water until you're giving your body some of the resources that it needs to recover from the alcohol so that you can have good quality sleep and that's going to boost your chances of being recovered. Yeah, I mean, staring at these graphs is fascinating and folks, we have all these graphs on our website at whoop.com slash locker. We'll also hopefully be sharing them if you're watching this on YouTube. It is such a sharp cliff for your average recovery. Again, this is the same number of drinks. but if the last drink is four hours before bed, your average recovery is at 60. And if it's three, you're at 58, if it's two hours before bed, 54, and if it's one hour,

it's at 50. So that difference of three hours accounts for 10% of recovery. And my guess is if you were to look at a distribution of an individual, that range gets even wider and more extreme. That I think is probably one of the biggest tips for if you want to drink and you want to optimize for your recovery, what are all the hacks that someone can do based on the information we've observed here? So the first big one is day drink instead of night drink. And if you're going to night drink, you know, like drinking with dinner when you're eating, especially carbs

and you're drinking water alongside the alcohol is going to have a very, very different process because the food's going to slow down the alcohol. So it becomes almost like slow release alcohol hitting your body over a longer period of time instead of if you drink on an empty stomach hits you all at once and you have this like big rallying response even if it's ultimately you know the same glass of whiskey or the same glass of beer or whatever it is so drinking it slowly drinking it with food drinking with water also if you're drinking you know more than a drink or too thinking about replacing those electrolytes that alcohol can deplete so drinking gatorade or any kind of sports drink or something like that can be really helpful

I'll add another direction as it relates to the alcohol itself. I mean, and I have a feeling this is highly personal, so take this as an end of one. But I've found personally that clear liquors versus dark liquors and wine versus beer, less negatively affect my recovery or my body. So when I drink now, I'm almost exclusively drinking clear liquors or wine versus whiskey from time to time or are you still like to drink beer from time and time. And now I kind of just don't drink them because I feel like they have such a negative effect on my body relative to other alcohols. Yeah. And I think that there's such a good point that you're bringing up there that

different people are going to respond to different types of alcohol differently. Like it's not all exactly the same thing. You know, the other stuff in there beyond the alcohol matters. It also matters, you know, if you're having a fruity cocktail with like a lot of juice or soda in it, you know, that's going to hit your body differently than if you have, you know, the same alcohol just neat. It's very worth paying attention to your own data and how you're responding. If you look at the data, right, and it's showing like the average person is only, you know, losing half of their HRV, right? That's because the people who are selecting to do this are just like fundamentally different people than me. And so, you know, if I looked at, you know, one, two,

three, four, five drinks, I think I would see personally a steeper slope because I'm, you know, smaller and lighter and, you know, less exposed to alcohol than the average person. And so while I think it's really interesting to talk about all these trends and certainly that the hacks of how to make the drinking better or somewhat universal, it is worth paying attention to your own data and seeing like, where do you sort of find that the balance of, you know, how I'm going to feel tomorrow versus, you know, how much fun I'm having drinking, like where that right tradeoff is so that you can make your own decision based on your own data. And that's why the power of the Woop Journal is so incredible, right, that we can look at these millions and millions of reports

of alcohol here and get a really good understanding about what happens at a population level, even breaking it down by things like age and gender. But ultimately, like, we're all going have slightly different experiences because we're all physiologically unique. And the Woop Journal features can help you understand your unique response to alcohol. And will, like you said, even more nuanced things like your response to beer versus wine versus scotch versus vodka, right, and all these different things. And so that you can make the most informed decisions about how to take this data and actually action it in your life. The other hack, I think, is drinking a lot of water right before bed.

I think this is a good recovery hack in general and a good lifestyle decision in general, but especially on nights where you've had a few drinks or more, the difference of just consuming a lot of water right before bed, the way that'll make you feel the next day, the way it'll help with your recovery score, or even your sleep quality, I think is quite profound. And I feel like I've done some A-B testing on that over the years. And water is a great get-out-jail-free card. Yeah, water, and I would even add, like, water or something with a little bit of electrolytes,

especially if you've been drinking a lot. And this is kind of a funny example where, you know, some of the advice that we might give, given that you've been drinking, is a little bit different than the advice we'd give more generally. because I'd also say, like, if you've been drinking a lot, it's probably a good idea to get a little bit of food in you before you go to bed, where generally we see that eating close to bedtime is bad for recovery. But if you do have a lot of alcohol, you know,

some of those carbs especially are going to give your body some of the resources it needs to, you know, respond to the alcohol and get it out of your system. And so I'm not going to bed, you've dehydrated and on an empty stomach and drunk, will help you recover the next day. Okay, well, that concludes it. You can drink folks. There are clever ways to drink optimally to the extent that you also still want your body to be bouncing back quickly. The recaps are here. Drinking alcohol meaningfully decreases your recovery, but does so on a fairly linear level with every drink. So, you know, the idea that two drinks is the same as four drinks, completely false. Each drink is meaningfully decreasing your recovery. there are a fair amount of population trends that we've observed. The first is that folks in Nebraska are really the biggest drinkers on whoop. So congratulations to the state of Nebraska.

Also don't want to leave out Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio. So those are the winning states for drinking on whoop. Well, we should call out the winners on the other side. So Oregon, New Mexico, and Vermont drink the lease. Wow. Shout out to those states for staying healthy. We've also observed really impactful data as it relates to when you drink before bed. So each hour that you drink closer to bed is going to meaningfully decrease your recovery with a very sharp relationship, even just between one hour, two hours, and three hours before bed. There are ways, of course, to hack recovery and alcohol, understanding what alcohol your body digests better, drinking lots of water, drinking further from bedtime is a big one that we just discussed, and of course, otherwise having a healthy diet. So the other big takeaway was December's the biggest drinking

month, and January, folks, is the driest month. Okay, well, that's the alcohol podcast with our fearless leader, Emily Capulupo. Emily, thanks for coming on. having me. Thank you to Emily for coming on the WOOP podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or review. Subscribe to the WOOP podcast. You can check us out on social at W-W-A-W-A-M-A-M-A-Mead. And don't forget, new members can use the code Will W-I-L-L to get a $60 credit on

W-U-C accessories. That's all for now, folks. stay healthy and stay in the green.