What Does Alcohol Do To Your Body?

A Healthier You Day 20

Alcohol is not a measure of maturity. Your organs do not need it.

Yeah, I know. You sound like a big boy when you boast about how many bottles of alcohol you can consume and still maintain your sanity. But alcohol is the one drink that negatively affects all of your body systems while administering insignificant benefits to you.

You’ll agree that alcohol is addictive, i.e. you can barely stop at one bottle. But, first, its sugar content induces a sugar rush that makes you reach for more. Then its intoxicating effect leaves you completely handicapped and unable to say no.

Negative Impacts of Alcohol

Excessive intake of alcohol – which is usually the case with most drinkers – can cause damage to your body in the following ways:

Digestive system

Alcohol is a fermentation product that undergoes a tough journey through the digestive tract. Consequently, its consumption leads to the malabsorption of food nutrients in the intestines. It also causes constipation, reflux disease, diarrhea, and increased gastric acid secretion (which can worsen ulcers) in the stomach. Excessive intake of alcohol has also been linked to throat, esophagus, colon, and rectum cancer. You better believe it. 😆

Nervous system

Alcohol dehydrates you, causing your brain tissue to contract. When your brain tissues contract occurs repeatedly, you can destroy your brain cells and depress your central nervous system.

Circulatory system

Alcohol hampers blood circulation (oxygen and nutrients) around the body by raising blood pressure, increasing heart rate, and damaging heart muscles. And hey, you should know what happens when your body cells cannot get sufficient oxygen and nutrients – programmed cell death!

Liver

Liver complications are pretty common among heavy drinkers. And this is because alcohol scars and inflames the liver, leading to deadly conditions like cirrhosis and hepatitis in the liver.

Your body cannot store alcohol because it is toxic to your cells. So, the liver does serious work of detoxification (via oxidative metabolism) each time you take an alcoholic drink. This detoxification converts alcohol to water and carbon dioxide – remember that carbon dioxide is what you breathe out, and oxygen is what you need.

So, the first problem is that alcohol intake loads your body with carbon dioxide, which you do not need because it can kill your cells. Secondly, the process of oxidative metabolism prevents the liver from oxidizing fat. As a result, fat starts to store in your liver. Very deadly.

Kidneys

An excessive intake of alcohol overworks your kidney. It leads to acute kidney injury, whereby your kidneys cannot properly filter toxins from your blood. You never want to have your blood distributing toxins into your cells!

Immune system

Your immune system responds to and repairs infections and injuries by responding to inflammation signals from affected spots. But alcohol blocks this signal route, preventing a prompt response to invasions in the body. When this process persists, your immune system becomes weakened and unable to fight diseases.

Reproductive system

You probably never imagined that the sedative feeling you get from alcohol occurs alongside gradual damage to your reproductive system. This is because excessive alcohol leads to the unnecessary breakdown of nutrients like zinc, sodium, vitamin B, calcium and potassium. And these nutrients are essential for producing the hormones responsible for the body’s reproductive processes.

In Conclusion

To make matters worse, most local alcohol companies do not know how to remove elevated amounts of methanol from their alcoholic products. Methanol is usually a by-product of the fermentation process used to produce alcohol. It is very similar to ethanol but is rather poisonous to humans. We all know red wine does the gut flora meagre good, but yogurt does even better and does not introduce toxins into your body.

Trust me, those moments of induced ecstasy are not worth the overall health of your body.