Health News resources and information

• A sensible limit for men is 2 or 3 pints (or their equivalent) two or three times a week, and for women 2 or 3 standard drinks two or three times a week. Women are more affected by a specific amount of alcohol than men because a smaller percentage of their body weight is made up of water. Alcohol is distributed throughout all the body’s fluid and so is more ‘dilute’ in men than women. Also, women’s livers seem to have a smaller capacity for detoxifying alcohol than do men’s. Recent research shows that the effect of even very moderate drinking in pregnancy is harmful to the baby so the rule should be-if you’re pregnant, don’t drink.

If you are drinking the equivalent of 4 pints of beer or 8 whiskies a day (for men) or 2 1/2 pints of beer or 3 glasses of wine and 2 glasses of sherry (for women) you are almost certainly in for serious trouble with alcohol.

• Look back over your drinking diary and see if there are particular times or occasions (or even people) which encourage you to drink. Try to cast your mind back to how you felt at the times when you drank. Were you, for example, frustrated, angry, sad, depressed or tense? Could it be that by getting professional help from a doctor or counselor you could re-order your life to avoid the situations that make you drink in these particular moods? Sorting out the underlying problems, b they a failing marriage, a disappointing sex life, a poor job, or whatever, could be the real cure for your drinking.

• Reward yourself with something nice (such as some new clothes, a visit to the cinema, or a meal out) if you succeed in cutting down on the amount you drink in situations that have previously trapped you (as judged by your drinking diary). Start saving the money you would have spent on drinks and buy something you really want or save for a holiday you otherwise could not afford.

• When out with friends who by rounds say you would rather buy your own-that way you will drink less. Make drinks last longer (actually go by the clock if that helps) and alternate alcoholic drinks with non-alcoholic ones.

• Set yourself limits for a particular occasion and stick to them. If you are going to a wedding reception, for example, tell yourself that you will have only two drinks, plus the champagne for the toast, and have soft drinks the rest of the time.

• Most of the above advice about prevention can prevent the moderate drinker from becoming a real alcoholic. But millions of individuals are already further down the road than this and sadly an estimated 85 per cent of all dried-out alcoholics eventually go back to drinking. Why this should be is not known but undoubtedly many have psychological problems that make it likely that they will always need a prop of some kind.

An increasingly vocal group of doctors believes that better results would be achieved by more radical dietary approaches to alcoholism. They suggest a switch from sugar, cigarettes and coffee to whole grains, fresh fruit and vegetables and vitamin supplements. Only a few US alcohol treatment centers use this nutritional approach but those that do claim good results. One expert in the field claims that alcoholics have a metabolic problem that makes them convert alcohol into a highly addictive morphine-like substance called tetra-hydro-isoquinoline (THIQ). Most alcoholics also develop hypo-glycaemia, she claims. They crave alcohol and sugar in any form. She puts them on a six-week programme which involves analyzing their mineral and vitamin status. This is often very poor in alcoholics and even in serious drinkers, as such people tend to eat little and what they do eat is often junk food. She then gives them full doses of vitamins  and Ñ and takes them off all refined foods, sugar, coffee and tobacco.

On this programme one US unit has 82 per cent of its patients still sober after a year. These results are, it claims, far better than the US National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism can achieve. The NIAAA’s figures show that only 15-20 per cent of all treated alcoholics are still dry after two years.

As long as twenty-five years ago Dr Roger Williams, the renowned US nutritional physician, used the amino-acid glutamine for the treatment of alcoholics. This reduces the terrible craving alcoholics have as they come off the alcohol. Â vitamins also reduce the craving.

If you are drinking more than a few drinks it makes sense to take a good vitamin  complex supplement and to change your diet to a healthy one as a preventive against the proven harm the alcohol will do you in the long term.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 4:30 am and is filed under General health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.