What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm ander huberman and am a professor of neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today we are discussing alcohol, one of the most commonly consumed substances on the planet earth.

SHE mentioned that both humans and non human animals consume alcohol either for recreational purposes because they like the feeling that IT gives them, or from additional purposes, or for other purposes that will discuss. We are, of course, going to discuss the effects of alcohol on our biology, ranging from its effects on individual cells, on organs and organ systems, in our brain body. We are also going to discuss the effects of the effects of alcohol, that is what being initiated really does to our thinking in our behavior and how IT does IT.

And we are going to address what seems to be one of the more common questions out there, which is whether not low to moderate amounts of drinking are Better for our health than zero alcohol consumption at all. And of course, we'll talk about severe alcohol intake being drinking. We will also talk about hang over and what science says about ways to reduce the effects of hangover, either by doing things that are innovators, meaning before you drink or while you drink, as well as things to do if you happen to have a hangover.

We will discuss some of the genetic differences for alcohol and alcoholism, and we will discuss alcohol consumption in Young people and how that can be especially detrimental for reasons that I think you're going to be quite surprising to most of you. My goal is that by the end of today's episode, you will have a thorough understanding of what alcohol does to your brain and body, and that you'll be able to make informed decisions as to whether or not you should be consuming zero, absolutely no alcohol, small to moderate amount of alcohol, and again, will define exactly what that means, small to mother amounts. And if you or somebody else that you know is consuming excessive amount of that are clearly detrimentally to your health, some of the Better routes and resources that you can use in order to remove that dependence and or consumption, i'd like to preface all of that by saying that today's discussion is really geared toward giving you information.

IT is not about judging alcohol intake or lack of alcohol intake. I just want you to be able to make the most informed decision about alcohol possible. Before we get in today's content in detail, I just want to answer a commonly ask question about alcohol consumption in the brain and the question that so often comes up is whether not low to moderate amounts of alcohol, and so maybe one drink a day or one or two drinkers a kind of thing, whether or not that is bad for your brain, in particularly whether not IT causes degeneration of neurons or nerve cells.

Now, the reason that question comes up so often is because for many years it's been known that high levels of alcohol consumption, so twelve to twenty four drinks per week or more, is certainly causing no generation, in particular, of the social neocortex, the outer layers of the brain that has associated memories, that how's our ability to think and plan, that how's our ability to regulate, are more primitive drives according to context at sea. So to make very clear, drinking a lot. So having, you know, three or four drinks per night every night of the week is clearly bad for the brain.

A recent study, however, finally addresses question of whether not low to moderate amount of alcohol consumption can cause brain degeneration. The title of the study is associations between alcohol consumption and gray and White matter volumes in the U. K.

Biobank, the united biobank. First, what gray matter are the neurons is that so called cell bodies that with house, the genome, the cells that that are in White matter is the connections, the fibers, the so called actions of neurons. And it's called White matter, because that that tissue is surrounded by a fatty tisa called mine, which allows nerve cells to communicate with each other very quickly.

So what the study did is IT looked at the brains, both the grain matter and the White matter, of more than thirty thousand indy, more than thirty five thousand, generally healthy middle aged and older adults in the united kingdom who were drinking various amounts alcohol. What they found was that even for people that were drinking low to moderate amount of alcohol, one or two drinks per day, there was evidence of thinking of the neocortex. So loss of neurons and neuroscience and other brain regions, and I don't say this in order to cause alarm.

I tell you this because they are important data, because they reveal and indeed answer the question that has been burning for so long. It's whether not chronic alcohol intake can disrupt the brain, even if the chronic intake is very low. Now we should talk about what the word chronic means, because many people, when they hear the word chronic, think high levels of whatever intake.

okay? So they think five drinks at ight or ten drink at night, or people drinking every night. Now in the study, they looked at people who, on average, were drinking one or two drinks per night.

So that could be fourteen drinks on the weekend. IT could be one drink per night. IT could be seven drinks on friday. In other words, on average, one or two drinks per night. And I think many people out there are drinking somewhere between one and two drinks, poor night or day of the week on average. So that would be seven to fortune drinks per week.

So this is an important study because IT says that if you're consuming even just seven glasses wine across the week, it's likely that there is going to be some degeneration of your brain in response to that alcohol intake. Although as mentioned earlier, we will talk about some of the things that can inoculate against some of that neuronal loss. For those of you they are interested in reading the study in more detail, we put a link to IT in the show out captions.

Before we begin, i'd like to that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank sponsors of today's podcast.

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Again, that drink element, element dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja, recessions and nsd r non sleep depressed protocols. I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens, and I started doing yoga eja about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations.

And they had a lot of different types of meditations to place, to bring your body into different states. And that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try. And I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have few minutes to meditate, other times have longer to meditate.

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If you'd like to try the waking up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up dot com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. Let's talk about alcohol, and let's just just acknowledge that human beings have been consuming alcohol for thousands of years.

If you look at the archaeological evidence for messiah taia, you'll find that five thousand years ago people had wine vessels. A few want to know when people first started stealing alcohol. Much of people surprised that did not first take place in ireland.

And that's not a joke about the irish that you'll see a lot of claims online that the irish were the first day is still alcohol, but in fact, they were not IT was the chinese that were the first to steal alcohol. And that took place in china in the first century. Alcohol has been used for nutritional purposes.

So there are cultures that believe in, indeed still believe that the calories in alcohol are useful. Of the later will talk about how alcohol calories are indeed empty calories and what an empty calories really is, why it's called empty alcohol has been used for additional al purposes because indeed IT does kill bacteria. And as you'll soon find out the fact that IT kills bacteria, because that is absolutely true, IT also kills the good bacteria in your gut.

And the destruction of that good bacteria your gut can lead to things like leaky gut syndrome and has all sorts of issues in their ways to deal with those issues. And we will talk about so alcohol has been used from additional al purposes. It's been used to clean surfaces, is used in my laboratory in order to make up so called the reagents to do our experiments.

But most humans have been consuming alcohol in order to change their internal state, in order to feel differently than they would otherwise. That feeling of being drunk or neighbor, tipsy or light headed is something that many, not all, but many humans seem to enjoy and pursue, even though. Typically, IT leads to a feeling of being less happy, less motivated, more stressed at seta when the alcohol wears off.

That's pretty incredible, right? I M, we're talking about a substance that people have been highly motivated to pursue that are still highly motivated to pursue, to create and to consume that you'll spend money on. And that's despite the fact that IT makes them feel good and then IT makes them feel lousy.

Now some of you might be saying, well, I drink, but I don't drink to access and therefore I don't feel lousy. I feel good when I drink and then IT wears off and that loves me. Get through my evening and then the next morning i'm ready to go okay um that very well may be true. I believe those people and as I mentioned the beginning, the episode i'm not here to demonize alcohol in any way, but I do want to point out what alcohol is and how IT creates the effects that IT does.

And then I want to talk about what those effects are when you engage in consuming alcohol, even as often as one or two nights per week or let's say you're just somebody has a drinker, two on friday, maybe a few more on saturday or maybe somebody who consumes all your alcohol one night per week or one night per month, we'll talk about how that's affecting your biology. So let's address what alcohol is and how IT affects the cells and tissues and organs of your body. Then we'll take a look at some of the epidemiology, that is, how many people are consuming alcohol and how much they're drinking.

And then you will be able, I think, to get a good sense of how the alcohol that you're drinking, if you're drinking any at at all, is impacting your brain and body and the choices you might want to make a about how and when to drink alcohol, or even if you want to eliminate alcohol altogether. Okay, so some basic chemistry and biology of alcohol. And again, i'll make this very clear, even if you don't have a chemistry biology background because of the structure of alcohol, IT is what's called both water soluble and fat soluble.

Translate into what's meaningful for you. What that means is when you drink alcohol, IT can pass into all the cells and tissues of your body. IT has no trouble just passing right into those cells.

So unlike a lot of substances and drugs that actually attached to the surface of cells, to receptors, as they called low parking spots, and then trigger a bunch of dow streams like domino casques of effects, alcohol actually has its own direct effects on sales because you can really just pass into those cells. So it's water at fat solvable. And the fact that I can pass into so many organs and cells so easily is really what explains its damaging effects.

As you mentioned that there are three main types of alcohol. There's ice, proposed method and ethyl alcohol. And only the last one, ethel, alcohol or Ethanol, is fit for human consumption.

However, IT is still toxic, okay? IT produces substantial stress and damage to sell. I'd love to be able to tell you oh, wise, but that's just a fact.

Ethanol produce a substantial damage to cells, and IT does that because when you adjust Ethanol, IT has to be converted into something else because IT is toxic to the body and there's a molecule inside of all of us called N A D. And you may heard of N A D because it's quite popular. There's a lot of discussion about N A D in the lung java literature right now.

An ad is present in all ourselves from birth until death. The levels of an d tend to go down across the lifespan. Their ideas that increasing levels of ad may extend life span.

A lot of that is still controversial, or at least we should say is on going in terms of the research. But nonetheless, you're just Ethanol. N A D and related about chemical pathways are involved in converting that Ethanol into something called a seto alter hide.

It's broken down into a seattle alter hide. And if you thought Ethanol was bad, a seattle alter hide is particularly bad. A seattle alter hide is poison. IT will kill cells and damages and kill cells, and is in discriminate as to which sells IT, damages and kills.

Now that's a problem, obviously, and the body deals with that problem by using another component of the N A D biochemical pathway to convert a seal elder hide into something called acted hesitate, is actually something that your body can use as fuel. And that process of going from Ethanol to the high to a does involve the production of a toxic molecule, right? Again, A C aldi ad is really toxic.

And N A D and IT, we want to get technical, the N A D to N A D H ratio. And that chemical step is the rate limiting step to Ethanol metabolise. Does that mean for you? What that means is that if your body can't do this conversion of Ethanol to see allowed high to action fast enough, well, I see, allow to hide, will build up in your body and caused more damage.

So it's important that your body be able to do this conversion very quickly. And the place where IT does that is within the liver, and cells within the liver are very good at this conversion process, but they are cells, and they are exposed to the cell to hide in conversion process. And so cells within the liver really take a beating in the alcohol metabolism events.

So the key thing to understand here is that when you are just alcoa, you are, yes, adJusting a poison, and that poison is converted into, even worse, poison in your body. And some percentage of that worst poison is converted into a former calories you can use to generate energy, generate atp. And the reason why alcohol is considered empty calories, because that entire process is very metabolically costly, but there's no real nutrition tive value of the calories that IT create.

You can use IT for immediate energy, but IT can't be stored in any kind of meaningful or beneficial way. IT doesn't provide any vitamins. IT doesn't provide any mino assets.

IT doesn't provide any fatty acid is truly empty calories. I know someone we will talk about sugar is empty calories. But sugar actually is a far Better fuel source than alcohol acted.

But none. There's when you just alcohol, some person is being shuttle into a worse poison, and some is being shuttle into a fuel source. Now the important thing understand is that IT is the poison, the C L, L, the hide itself, that leads to the effect of being annee berated or drunk.

I think most people don't realize that that being drunk is actually a poison induced disruption in the way that your neural circuits work. And so we should ask ourselves that which neural circuits, what brain areas, what body areas involved in feeling drunk or initiator now, in thinking about the state of being tipsy or happier, really drunk or a little bit drunk, want to mention something I think most people aren't aware of. And that's the fact that for people that are regular drinkers or that have a genetic previous position to alcohol, lisa, when they drink, they tend to feel very energized and very good for longer periods of time.

Again, people have a genetic previous position to our color. People who are chronic drinkers, or even just, if you recall, chronic doesn't have to mean a tony of alcohol, but they're drinking one or two per night or their every other nightlight drinkers, or thursday through sunday drinkers. Those people typically experience an increase in a alertness and mood when they drink, whether occasional drinkers will have a brief er meaning less long lasting period of feeling good when they drink and then more quickly transition into a state in which they're tired or they start losing motor skills, they start slurring their speech.

I also want to exercise, this is distinct from tolerance, will talk about tolerance later and exactly what tolerance means. But I really want to highlight the fact that when people in just this poison, indeed IT is poison, the range of effects is very different. And you can reliably predict who are the people with a previous position to alcoholism, and who are the people who are more regular drinkers by the on tour, the timing of the different effects.

And again, people who tend to feel more lern excited every time they drink, they tend to get a real lift. They become kind of life of the party. And that last a long while.

Those people are the ones that really have to be careful about previous position for alcoholism. And those people also need to be careful about their drinking in the amount of drinking that they're doing, even if they're not full blown alcoholic. Now, of course, people who are ingesting alcohol, who are not a customer to drink alcohol, have to be concerned about drink alcohol for other reasons.

Because I can impair a motor function and judgment that a, but in thinking about the biochemical effects of alcoa, what is doing into the body, what is doing in all cases is is consumed into the gut, right? Goes the stomach, the liver immediately started this conversion that we talked about before, Ethanol to asit and some amount of a an actor, or making IT into the brain that crosses the blood brain berrier. Again, the brain has this fence surrounded that we call the blood brain berry or the B B B.

Many things, most things, thankfully, can't pass across the blood brain berrier. But alcohol, because it's water and fat solyman, all just choose right across the fence and into the meu the environment of the brain, which is made up of a couple different major sell types, neurons, nerve cells and so called glial cells, which are in between the nerve cells. I will talk about the effects on each of those soon.

So what what happens when alcohol gets into the brain that makes us feel tips you drunk, and in some people makes people feel really especially energized and happy? Well, alcohol is in discriminate in terms of which brain areas IT goes to. Again, IT doesn't bind to particularly receptors, but IT does seem to have a propensity or an affinity for particular brain areas that are involved in certain kinds of thinking and behavior.

So one of the first things that happens is that there is a slight, at least after the first drinker, second drink, there's a slight suppression in the activity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex. This is an area of your neo cortex that's involved in thinking and planning, and perhaps above all, in suppression of impulsive behavior. So if you go to a party and they're serving alcohol and people are consuming drinks, what you'll nose is that a few minutes into that party, the volume of people's voices will increase.

And that's because people are simply not paying attention to their voice modulation. And other people start speaking more loudly. Other people are speaking more loudly.

We've all had this experience, right, of going to a party and you step outside for a moment on my end and so shouting you come on in the next day you've got a sort throat might be that you picked up some sort of bug, some virus or something. But often times it's just the fact you been shouting all night just to be heard. Because as the prefrontal cortex shuts down, people stop modulating.

Their their level of speech quite as much also knows that people start just stimulating more. People start standing up and sitting down more. They start walking around more.

There's music on. People might spontaneous ly start dancing. All of this is because these areas of the profondo cortex Normally are providing what's called top down inhibition. They are releasing a neurotransmitter, E R, called gaba, onto various part of the brain that involved in impulse sive motor's behavior and thought patterns. And as you shut down the prefrontal cortex, that gorgie suppression of impulses starts to be released.

So people survey things that they want to say without so much for thought about what they're saying they might do, things that they want to do without really thinking IT through quite as much when they might not even remember thinking IT through at all, or experience, I should say, thinking IT through at all. We have been talking about backing out yet in the effects of alcohol memory. But as long we're there, i'll just tell you that alcohol has a very strong effect in suppressing the neural networks that involved in memory formation and storage.

This is why often time we forget the events of a night out. If we've been drinking, one of the more important things to know about the effects of alcohol, the brain, is this disruption in top, down, in ambition, but also that areas of the brain that are involved in flexible behavior sort of considering different options, like I could do A, I could do B. I could say this, and then I could say that, I could say that in that way, I could say in this way, this might be a little more taxable.

Those brain areas basically shut down entirely, and people just tend to say what they want to say. So the key thing understand is that when people drink the prefrontal cortex and top down, innovation is diminished. That is, habitual behavior and impulsive behavior starts to increase. Now what's interesting is this is true in the short term, so after people have won or two, maybe three or four drinks. But it's also true that the more often that people drink, there are changes in the very circuits that underly habitual and impulsive behavior.

But this is really important highlights, so much so that I want to drill into IT a little bit more deeply for the person that drinks, say, every thursday night or every friday night, or goes out only on saturdays, but every saturday, there's evidence that there are changes in the neural circuits of the brain that control habitual behavior and impulsive behavior. And they are modified and strengthens in ways that make those people more habitable and more impulsive outside the times in which they are drinking. And when they drink in pulse ve inhabit, ual behavior tends to increase even further.

This is something that's not often talked about when discussing the effects of alcohol. And we all know the effects of being drunk can be bad, right? Can be bad in terms of judgment. Motorola, certainly, driving drunk is a terrible thing, get your other people killed and so on. But rarely do we hear about the changes in neural circuits from just one or two nights of regular drinking.

Again, chronic drinking doesn't necessarily mean every day and every night IT could be the person that simply drinks every thursday, every friday or just once a week has three or four drinks, or maybe even a few more, that person is going to experience a decrease in this top down inhibition. So an increase in in pulse vary in haiti al behavior because the break on those behaviors or has been removed while they're drinking, but also changes in the very neural circuits that allow habitual and impulsive behavior to occur more readily even when they're not drinking. And if you want to know the actual substrates for that, the cellars or substrates, T, I can briefly describe IT.

It's really interesting. Again, you don't need know any biology. You don't understand this. What IT does is that increases the number of synapses, the actual points of connection in the neural circuits that control habitual behavior. So there's literally a growth of the neural circuits in your brain that lead to existing habit execution, right?

The performance of things you already know how to do, and a reduction in the neural circuits where, I should say, a reduction in the number of synapses of the context within the neural circuits that are controlling behavior. So this, again, is a not often discussed aspect of alcohol intake. Fortunately, IT is reversible.

So when animals are humans that undertake a period of absence of anywhere from two to six months, these neural circuits returned to Normal, accepting cases where people have been chronically drinking large volumes of alcohol for many, many years. And in those cases, while there is some recovery of brain circuitry after, uh, people get sober, bringing completely sober, they stop drinking entirely. There is evidence of long lasting impact of heavy alcohol usage throughout the lifespan.

But of course, this doesn't mean that anyone that suffering from alcohol m that used to should not continue to focus on their health. You absolutely should always not lost. But for people that have been drinking for a lot years, maybe you went to college and you drink a lot in those years and your neural circuits change.

If there's a period in which you don't drink alcohol, again, from two to six months and ideally longer, those neutral circuits can then be removed fied back to their original state. So let's consider some of the other neurochemical effects of alcohol in the brain and body. And again, for right now, we're confining the conversation to people that are drinking, on average, one or two drinks per night.

Now some people might think that two drinks provide is a lot, and a lot of that will depend on body weight. So for insincerely who weigh one hundred and ten pounds, for them to ingest two alcohol drinks is going to be substantially different in terms of the biochemical effects. Then somebody who wakes two hundred and twenty pounds, of course, tolerance will also factor into this.

Genetic background will also factor into this, and indeed, whether not people have eaten will factor into this. So there are a lot of factors, and we'll talk about that for the time being. If you're curious about how food impacts the effects of alcohol and your feelings are being drunk, you may heard, for instance, that if somebody's initiated and they want to sober up, they should eat something.

Turns out that does not work. Here's how IT does work. However, if you eat something prior to drinking alcohol, or while interesting alcohol IT will slow the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream.

In other words, you won't feel as drunk as fast. For many of you, this probably comes as no surprise. In particular, if that meal includes carbo, hydrates, fat and proteins. Okay, the inclusion of all three major, major nutrient seems to slow the absorption of alcohol to the bloodstream far more than any than having any one of those or two of those micrometer trians present.

Now, if you are already initiated, or you've had a glass of wine or where you eat something, chances are that alcohol already made IT into your bloodstream, because IT moves into the bloodstream so quickly. Again, it's fat soldiers and water soluble. So within minutes, right, if you, if you have an empty stomach, within five to ten minutes, that alcohol is gonna within your bloodstream and distributed throughout your body may be even faster, depending on the type of alcohol and your metabolism.

But if you're already drunk, can you eat something? It's not gonna you you up more quickly, but it's certainly will blunt the effects of any additional alcohol that you might consume. And if you're somebody who is concerned about getting too drunk too quick, even from a small amount of alcoa, having some food in your gut can certainly be beneficial.

Now that's food in alcohol, the absorption alcohol. But let's go back to talking about the biochemical and neurochemical effects of the alcohol on the brain. We talked about top down inhibition, and we talked about habitual and impulsive behavior circuitry.

There also dramatic changes in the activity of neurons that control the release of so called serotonin. Serotonin is a neuromodulator. IT changes the activity of neural circuits. And many neural circuits, in particular, those involved in mood and feelings, are well being. Recently, there's been a lot of interest in serotonin because of a study that was released that showed pretty conclusively that serotonin levels can't really explain depression and depression like symptoms.

I want to make IT very clear that although that study did show that serotonin levels are not necessarily associated depression, the study was interpreted by many to mean that S S R I selective seton's reuptake inhibits, which have the net effect of increasing certain on these are things like prosaic at sea, that those drugs are somehow not helpful because they increase serotonin. And serotonin isn't involved in depression. That logic doesn't really hold together.

Someone uses as an opportunity to just clarify what really occur there. And they will talk about how serotonin relates to alcohol consumption in things like feeling good and in depression. The key thing is this sis can help via depression.

That's right. assa. I can help deviate depression. They are often not always associated with side effects. Dosage is very important at seta, but they probably support released from depression by changing neural circuits, not necessarily by increasing serotonin itself. That is, increasing serotonin with these drugs likely change the neural circuits involved in mood, allowing people to feel Better through so called neural plastics y, which is the brain ability to change itself in response to experience. So there's a bit of confusion.

And again, i'm using this episode on on alcohol to highlights some of the confusion because I think it's timely because the stage just came out and there's a lot of chatter about this out there that when people are depressed, it's not necessarily because serotonin levels are low. However, if serotonin levels are increased with things like projects s all off and other access arise, often times, there is, yes, a relief from depression. But that's probably not because of restoring sara tony levels persue.

It's probably because serotonin facilitate the changes in neural circuits that need to occur in order for people to feel elevated mood. okay. So again, that's a bit of attention and aside, but I do think it's a vital one for people to know about.

Again, if you're think about taking accessorize, you're currently taking them and heard this news default talk to your doctor. There is great utility for some of these s and also in conditions like ocd, they've been shown to be very beneficial. So we really don't want to throw S S out as a potentially valuable treatment.

Getting back to the effects of alcohol on serotonin is very clear beyond any doubt that many of the circuits in the brain that are involved in mood and feelings of well being, and also so self, imagine how we see ourselves employ the neuromodulator serotonin. And alcohol, when we adjust IT and it's converted into a cycle, although hide IT goes and that a see the alto hide access, the toxin at the very synapses, the connections between the ergin neurons and lots of other. In other words, when we adjust alcohol, the toxic effects of alcohol disrupt those mood circuit.

Ries, at first, making them hyperactive. That's right. Making them hyperactive is why people become really talk of. People started to feel really good after a few service of alcohol. Ast, most people do.

And then, as they can, just more alcohol, or as that alcohol wears off, serotonin levels and the activity of those circuits really starts to drop. And that's why people feel less good. And typically, what they do, they going get another drink and they attempt to get a store, that feeling of well being in mood.

Now, typically what happens is that is people in just the third and forth may be even the fifth drink. There is an absolute zero chance of them recovering that energized mood, right? Most people, as they drink more and more, will now start to feel more and more suppressed.

The forebrain is now shutting down quite a lot. A lot of the motor cortical areas that control coordinated movement and deliberate movements start to shut down. So people start to flower their speech, people start to shuffle their feet, people forget their posture, people start to lean on things, people start passing out on couches.

There's a great depression, not depression of the psychiatric depression sort, but a depression of alertness and arousal. And eventually people will pass out. Now I said most people, because there's a subset of people that have gene variants, or who are chronic drinkers or who are chronic drinkers and have gene variants that as they adjust the third and fourth and fifth drink, what happens? They become more alert, they start talking more.

They feel great. They have all sorts of ideas about the fun they could have that night. And they are the ones that if you've ever fall asleep at a party for whatever reason, or you've getting tired and you're jonny, are looking around the room like these people are still drinking and party in their having what seems to be the amazing time.

Often, not always, those are the future alcoholics in the room where those are the people that have a genetic previous position for alcoholic, or those are the chronic drinkers, the people who have built up enough of tolerance, or who have the chemical genetic makeup such that increasing amounts of alcohol make them feel Better and Better and Better. And of course, they too have a thread hold beyond which never system will start to get diminished, and they're pass out, fall over and set a but that threshold is way, way higher than IT is for most people. Now, this is important, understand, and it's important understand, because I think everyone should know and recognize their own previous position and kind of risk in terms of developing alcoholism is also important understand, because IT relates to the phenomenon of blackout.

You know many people think that black out is passing out, but black out drunk is when people drink and they're talking in doing things. Sometimes, sadly they are, or tragically, they'll often drive home or walk home, or they're hop on a bicycle and ride home. They'll swimming in the ocean.

All, of course, very dangerous activities to do when people are really drunk are even a little bit drunk in some cases. So these people will do these sorts of things, and they do them because they have the energy to do them, and they feel god while doing them. But they're doing them while the activity of neurons in the hip campus, which is involved in memory formation, are completely shut off.

And this is why the next day you tell them they wish. Talk about what happened last night. What happened last night said, do you remember going in the party? Yeah, I was great to do this. And then what? And it's very clear all the sudden that they have no recollection of all the things they were doing despite being awake.

Now I ish, I could tell you that there's some sort of blood test or other biomarker, even a fingerprint test, that would allow you to determine whether or not you have a propensity to be one of these drinkers that has a pretty position for alcoholism. And if you've ever been black out drunk, and certainly you ve been blackout drunk more than a few times, you should be quite concern. And as we talk more about the more chronic effects and long lasting effects of alcohol consumption little bit later in the episode, think I will become clearer as to why you should be concerned.

But in any case, there is something that can tell you whether or not you might be in that category versus likely not in that category. I looted to this a couple of times already. But I want to be clear that when people drink, no matter who you are initially, there's that shutting down to those prevent to cortical circuits.

There's a gradual shutting down to the circuits, the control memory, but then people divide into these two bins. And these two bins are the people who, after more than a couple of drinks, start to feel sedated, and the people who, after more than a few drinks, do not start to feel stated. Now, of course, there is going to be differences created by how quickly people are drinking, whether not they're combining different types of alcohol, the types of alcohol, IT, said a, but in general, that can predict whether not you're somebody who has a pretty position for alcohol listed or not.

One also very interesting finding is that alcohol changes the relationship between what's called the hyper thillard and the pituitary gland in the address inal. Now the hypothalamus is a small collection of neurons about the size of a large gmb. Bel sits above the roof, your mouth and IT houses.

Neurons are responsible for some incredible aspects of our behavior in our mindset. Things like rage, things like sex drive, things like temperature regulation, very primitive functions, including appetite, thirst at seta, alcohol because I can go anywhere in the brain, remember its water and fat solyman, all has effects on the hypothesis. The hypothesis Normally provides very specific signals to what called the patuit tory gland.

This is a little glass that actually sticks out of the brain, but IT receives instructions from the hypothalamus. And then the patuit tory releases hormones into the bloodstream that go and talk to your adrenals, your dreamer. Lds, sit right about your kidneys in your lower back and your dreams released.

As the name suggests, a general also called up an effort, and also a molecule called cortical, which is involved in the kind of longer term stress response to have some healthy effects to on the immune system OK. So the hypothermic patuit renal access, I know it's a mouthful ful you don't need to remember the names, but the hypothermia Petergate ory jinan access maintains your physiological baLance of what you perceive is stressful and what you don't perceive as stressful people who drink regularly. So this, again, could be just wanted to drinks per night, or could be somebody that drinks just on fridays, or just on saturdays, or maybe just on the weekend, two to four drinks.

Will those people experience changes in their hythloday c patuit ory dro axis that result in more cortisol, more of this so called stress hormone, being released at baseline when they are not drinking? This is really important. People who drink a bit. And when I say a bit, I don't mean one or two ships, or even a glass wine every once in a while.

I mean, again, people that are maybe having one drink night with dinner and maybe on the weekend a few more, can I offer a bunch of different patterns to explain how he could also be two or three drinks on friday, or six drinks only on saturday? Will all of those groups experiences increases in court is all release from the original gLance when they are not drinking. And as a consequence, they feel more stressed and more anxiety when they aren't drinking.

This is a seldom talk about effect of alcohol, because so often we hear about the immediate effects of alcohol, and we've been talking about some of those effects, effects like reducing the amount of stress. I mean, how many times that we heard somebody say, H, I need a drink, and then they have a drink, and then they calm down. Now can shake off the thoughts about the day's work.

They can start to think about things, and there may be more grounded, irrational, away, or at least they believe that. Or they can somehow just real x themselves. Well, well, that very well may be true that you can relax them when they are not drinking. That level of court is all that's released at baseline has increased substantially.

Again, this relates to a defined neural circuit between brain and body, and IT has to do with the ratio of cortisol to some of the other horton involved in the stress response will provide a reference to the study that describes how all of this works for those who that really want to delve into IT. But let's go back to this issue. Of those who are proud to alcohol is immerses.

Those who are not, remember, there are people who have genetic variants that meaning genes that they inherit from their parents that make IT more likely that they will become alcoholic. But there are also people who drink often, who start to experience this increase in alertness the longer they drink across the night. Part of that effect, we think, is because of changes in this hypolito c tuitert juno axis.

So alcohol is kind of a double hit in this sense. It's causing changes in our brain circuitry and neurochemistry that at the time in which we are negated are detrimental. And it's causing changes in neural circuit tory that persists long past the time in which we're experiencing the feeling of being tipsy or drunk.

Now again, I don't want to demonize alcohol. I'm not saying or you know if you have a glass one now again or you drink a beer now and again or even have um you know a mixed in now and again or a shot that that's necessarily terrible for you. I certainly do not want that to be the message.

What i'm saying is that if people are ingesting alcohol chronically, even if it's not every night, there are well recognize changes in neural circuits, there are well recognized changes in neurochemistry within the brain, and there will recognize changes in the brain to body stress system that generally point in three directions, increase stress when people are not drinking, diminished mood and feelings of well being when people are not drinking. And as you're soon learn, changes in the neural circuitry that caused people to want to drink even more in order to get just back to baseline or the place that they were in terms of their stress modulation and in terms of their feelings of mood before they ever started drinking in the place. So again, I don't want to demonize alcohol, but I do want to emphasize that there are a long term plastic changes, meaning changes in neural circuitry and harmon circuitry.

That across a period of several months, and certainly across a period of years of the sorts of drinking patterns I described, which I think for most people are going to sound like pretty typical, right? I I mean, nothing that I described so far was about drinking a case, and I or or about binging on alcohol in the way that we often hear about IT in the news. These are pretty common patterns of alcohol consumption.

And you have to do is board a transgenic flight or actually go to an airport on a sunday afternoon in a Sunny area of the U. S. You know, people are having three, four, five, six bears at sea.

Again, personal choice is personal choice. I'm not telling you what to do, but it's very clear that those sorts of drinking patterns are changing neural circuitry, and they're changing hormones ritti. And i'd love to be able tell you that they're changing them for the Better, but they simply are not.

They're actually changing them for the worse and worse is defined as making people less resilient to stress, higher levels of baseline stress and lower mood. Overall, i'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called ag one, is a vitamines al probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.

I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic Greens in the reason I still take athletic Greens once, are usually twice a day, is that IT gets to be the probiotics that I need for god. Health, our god is very important, is populated by got microbial to that communicate with the brain, the immune system and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediately and long term health.

And those probiotics and athletic Greens are optimal and vital for microbiology alth. In addition, athletic Greens contains a number of adaptations in vitamin minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met and IT tastes great. If you'd like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman, and they'll give you five free travel packs that make IT really easy to mix up athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, at sea.

And they'll give you a year supply of vitamin d three k two. Again, that's athletic Greenstock comes slash huberman en to get the five free travel packs in the year supply of vitamin d three k two. Now, i've been talking a little bit about genetic predisposition, but there are a couple of important points i'd like to make about that.

First of all, what sorts of genes are involved in setting someone down the path of alcoholism or not? Well, you should come as no surprise that the genes that chronic alcohol usage modifies, they tend to fall primarily in the pathways related to genetic control over serotonin receptor or ga receptors. Remember that top down innovation in the involvement a ga, and no surprise the h pa hypothermic pauvre ory.

access. All of those, of course, combined with environment, they combine with patterns of abuse, right? We know that if you're in a social setting where a lot of people are drinking, the likelihood you're going to drink as much higher social pressures, trauma, right?

Some people who use alcoa to self medicate, to try and turn off they're thinking or to deal with trauma sea. They combined with the environment, but the genes that are in the certain onan synthesis and reception synthesis pathway, gaba and H P A access, combined with environmental pressures to give rise to alcohol use disorders. So there's a fairly coherent picture that we have here, right? This is not a case where, for instance, people that have a lot of the ensign from a tablet, zing alcoa, which will talk about a minute alcohol d hydrogen.

It's not like they are necessarily the people that become alcoholic, where as certainly in certain cultures, certain asian cultures in particular, there are gene differences that lead them to have low levels of alcohol. Hydrogen, is there actually people who have so little alcohol dehydrates that when they injust alcohol, they get very red and they just feel sick. So if you somebody has a sip of alcohol, you just feel horrible, makes you feel nauseous.

Chances are you have gene variants that create a situation. We are not making very much alcohol dehydrogenation. You would just simply can't metabolite alcohol. So you just get a rapid build up of the toxic effects of alcohol, the seattle alter hide, you're not converting IT into those empty calories.

But in cultures where you have a lot of genetic variants and genes expressed in people where they have a lot of alcohol, I hydrogens sure they can drink more and they're converting more of that alcohol from its toxic form to a nontoxic form. And yes, of course, you will observe more alcoholism in those communities because they're drinking more. But I do want to emphasize that the environmental factors are playing a strong role there too, because if you can drink more, you're likely to drink more.

If you're somebody that feel feel sick immediately from drinking is likely that you're not going engaging in alcohol consumption, especially if these things are genetic related. And of course, genes and culture and location in the world tend to run together. So do you have the gene for alcoholism where there isn't one single gene? Chances are if you have an immediate relative whose chronic abuse er of alcohol, or several relatives chronic abuse ers of alcohol, well, that's going to prety dispose you to be an alcoholic.

But since you don't know which genes you express unless you do, genetic testing in those things are available. But most people aren't doing that. This essay, if you will, it's not an essay.

As we say, an essay is a test that you run in the lab to determine something and is not one that I recommend that you go drink in order to do. But if you notice that you are somebody else, somebody who can drink a lot throughout the night and have increased energy, can just drink and drink a drink. And especially if there is black out episodes not remembering things the next day, despite being alert throughout the entire night, so on.

Well then I would be very concerned that you might actually have a genetic, very predisposing you to alcoholism. The other thing that predisposes people to abuse of alcohol is age. People who start drinking at Younger ages are greatly pretty disposed to developing alcohol dependence, regardless of your family history of alcoholism.

Someone to repeat that people who start drinking Younger are at great risk developing alcoholism, even if they don't have alcoholism in their family. Now, of course, you don't have to be an epidemiologist. Understand that if you grow up in a family of drinkers and alcohol is everywhere, especially if there's peer pressure or lack of oversight, then there's going to be a higher tendency or a higher probability.

I should say, that you will start drinking at a Young age, age, however, even people that grow nowhere near their relatives if they start drinking at a Young age. So for at thirteen or Younger, fourteen or fifteen, there's a much higher probability that they are going to develop a long lasting dependence on alcohol. People who take their first step of alcohol later, fifteen, sixteen or one would hope, even later, I can say one would hope because i'm now of that you know, age and generation where you you think about all the things that, uh, Young people do and you, oh got if they only would wait or if they only would abstain, you know what happens?

I know there's some neural circuit for that that I can't explain yet, but people who, for instance, drink only once they reach legal age of drinking, which in the U. S. I believe in every state, twenty one years old, if they take their first drink at twenty one, the probability that they'll go on to develop full blown alcohol dependence or alcohol use disorder, as it's called a ud, is very low.

Now a subset of them will, because they have such a strong genetic previous position, or maybe life circumstances, create pattern in which they become chronic drinker. But I found this very interesting genes matter. But also, the age in which somebody starts drinking really matters.

Now, whether not that's because there are changes in neural circuit, tory, as a consequence of that drinking, that make people want to seek out more and more alcohol or whether or not there's some other effect, maybe it's a change in hormones that said a that predisposes those Young drinkers to become chronic drinkers, even full blown, certainly developing alcohol use disorder. There's definition for that. We can talk about IT involves the amount of drinking over a certain period of time, he said.

So it's very clear that drinking early in life creates a propensity for the development of alcohol use disorder later in life. And while there is a genetic component to developing alcohol use disorder, I find IT very interesting that if people who have those gene variants delay the onset of drinking, well, then they probably that they'll develop full blown alcohol use disorder drops as well. So again, as genes and environment, not any either or, and there is no single gene for alcoholism.

Well, I promise you, I will also talk about some of the documented positive effects of alcohol, although they are very few and far between they do. But before I do that, I would be remiss if I didn't emphasize some more of the terrible things that alcohol does in the way that IT does IT. And for those of you that enjoy alcohol, I can, I really, I like, say, I feel guilty about telling you this because I know how much some people enjoy a good drink.

Everyone's in a while. And I say a good drink because some people do like the taste of alcohol. I suppose I looked out and that I don't really like the taste of alcohol and just puts to me to sleep. But I know that people do enjoy IT.

And I do want to point out that there is zero evidence that, you know, provided somebody is of drinking age, certainly not in the stage of brain development, that having one drink or two drinks every now and again, meaning every three or four weeks or once a month, that is not going to cause major health concerns or major health issues from most people. I suppose if you have zero or very little alcohol hydrological is that might make you feel sick, but then you're not probably not the kind of person that's going to be drinking at all. So again, if you enjoy, i'll all drink.

I'm not trying to um take them away from you by any means, but you should know what drinking does if you are consuming IT. In this kind of typical rony patterns, we can now refer to IT, which is that one or two night or a few stacked up on friday and maybe three or four on saturday, this kind of pattern of drinking, which is quite common. And one of the more serious effects that we should think about is the impact on the so called gut brain access, or fork of today's discussion, the gut liver brain access.

I don't think the good liver brain access has ever been discuss on this podcast. Maybe any podcast of the i'm going to the good liver brain access people are going to come after me with, I suppose, gut, liver, brain and brains. In any event, you have a brain, you have a gut that got runs from your throat down to the end of your interesting you're got in your brain, communicate by way of nerve cells, neons and nerve connections, the vegas nerve in particular, and by way of chemical signals.

You're gut also communicates by way of chemical signaling and believe or not, by way of neural signaling to to your liver. And as we talked about earlier, the liver is the first time in which alcohol is broken down a metabolize into its component parts. The liver is also communicating with the brain through chemical signaling and neural signals.

So we have the gut, liver, brain access. And what you find is that people who are just alcohol at any amount are inducing a disruption in the so gut microbiome, the trillions of little microbe acterrally that take residents in your gott and that live inside you all the time, and that help support immune system. And that literally signal by wave, electrical signals and chemical signals to your brain to increase the release of things like serotonin and dopamine e, and regulate your mood generally in positive ways.

What alcohol really disrupt those bacteria? This should come as no surprise. I mean, earlier we talked about this, and it's well known.

If you want to, it's sterilized, something when I killed the bacteria, you pour alcohol on IT. And I remember scraping myself for cutting myself. I was always injuring myself when I was a kid.

And you know, the moment they take out the peroxide and like a boy here, IT comes. But if there's no peroxide around and you ve got a wound there, I need to clean IT out. Yeah, they'll use alcohol, which I do not recommend.

By the way, that's one of the hardest way to clean a wound. But for centuries, thousands of years, really, alcohol has been used in order to clean things and kill bacteria. So alcohol kills bacteria, and IT is in discriminate with respect to which bacteria IT kills.

So when we adjust alcohol and goes into our gut, IT kills a lot of the healthy gut microbiota. At the same time, the metabolic alcohol in the liver, which you now understand that pathway involving an idea, see the, see the elder hide and state, that pathway is pro inflaming. So it's increasing the release of inflaming cytec things like I six, that said a two and a rosas factor alpha.

You'd like to learn more about the immune system. We did episode all about the immunity stem. You can find a human lab dom, and teach all the basics of what our side of kinds, what our mast sells, is Better.

In any event, all these prin, flaming ory molecules, those are being released, you've now got disruption of the gut microbiota. As a consequence, the lining of the gut is disrupted, and you develop at least transiently leaky gut, that is, bacteria that exists. The gut, which are bad bacteria, can now pass out of the gut into the bloodstream.

So you ve got a two hit kind of model here in biog. We talk about two hit models that is kind of a one plus one equals four, and is generally when you hear two hit is not a good thing. So you've got bad bacteria from partially broken down, food moving out of the gut.

The good bacteria the gut have been killed, you might say, why isn't the alcohol killed the bad bacteria in the gut? Well, the bad bacteria that are from partially digested food often times escape the gut before the alcohol can disrupt them. And so now you've got leaks in the gut wall, you ve got the release of this bad bacteria, you ve got inflaming cki ds and other things being released from the liver, and they're able to get into the brain through what's called a neuroma in signal.

And what's really bizarre in terms of the way that this manifest in the brain. I mean, it's not the way I would have done IT. But then again, as I always say, I wasn't consulted at the design phase.

And anyone who says they did, you should be very skettles al of them. The net effect of this is actually to disrupt the neural circuits that control regulation of alcohol intake, and the night effect of that is increased alcohol consumption. So this is just terrible, right?

I mean, to you d take in something that disrupt systems that got microbial and IT disrupts in two ways. It's killing the good, got microbiota, and it's allowing the bad bacteria to move from. They got into the blood stream.

You ve also got pro inflammatories sad kinds coming from the liver, and those converge or arrive in the brain and create a system in which the neural circuits caused more drinking. That's a bad situation. And this is why people who drink regularly, even if it's not a ton of alcohol, again of these sorts of patterns, are drinking.

And talk about before uncertainly, for those that are chronic heavy drinkers, what you end up with is a situation in which you have inflamed tion in multiple places in the brain and body, and the desire to drink even more into further exacerbate that information and the gut leaky. So this is basically a terrible scenario for the gut, liver, brain access, and it's especially prevalent in so called alcohol use disorder. Again, people are interesting somewhere between two thousand and twenty four drinks per week for those of you that are interested in learning more about the gut, liver, brain access and in particularly alcohol use disorder or provide a link in the shower note captions.

There's a wonderful review on this, the details that but on the positive side, IT points to the possibility that at least some, again, at least some of the negative effects of alcohol consumption, whether not you're somebody is currently ingesting alcohol or who used in justice alcohol, is trying to go to repair these systems of the brain body, whether not replenishing the got microbiota is going to be beneficial. We know that there are ways to do that. And when we know that there's at least some promise for the ability for the system to repair itself, how does one do that? I've talked before about this on the podcast, but studies done by colleagues of my stanford, Justin sonnenburg, who's been on this podcast as a guest in amazing episode all about the got microbiome, and his collaborator Christner, also its time ford school of medicine, have explored not alcoholics m but what ways to improve the got microbiota, in particular, to reduce the production of inflaming side of on and to adjust.

What's all the inflameth you've heard of the genome and the proteome, well, the inflammatory, the total array, or at least the near total array of and proteins that control inflation tion. How can you reduce inflation tion and make that inflamed ome healthier? Well, they've shown that two to four servings are fermented foods per day. And here i'm not refer to fermented alcohol, and I am low sugar fermented things like kim cheese sour crowd um not to for the for those of you that like japanese food um there are others I know things like key for things like uh yogurts have a lot of active bacteria gain low sugar for ideas of all these things. Those are terrific at reducing inflammatory markers and at improving the gut microbes.

One could imagine that either inoculating oneself from some of the effects of alcohol, although i'd prefer that people just not drink alcohol tronka, Frankly, or if somebody he's trying to repair their got microbial because they injured ted a lot of alcohol because they had a lot of these inflammatories of kinds for many years or even a short period of time. Regular in gestion of two to four servings of these fermented foods can be um quite beneficial. Want to make IT clear that has not been examined specifically in the context of alcohol use disorder, but because a huge component of the negative effects of alcohol use disorder are based in this gut, liver, brain access and disruption.

The gut microbiome, inflammatory python's IT, stands to reason that things that are well established to improve information status in others, ds reduce inflation. Tion such as interesting to the four servings of low sugar fermented foods per day, make sense in terms of trying to repair, replacing the system. One could also imagine taking probiotic ics or probiotic ics.

Certainly that would work as well, although i've sort of favoured the discussion around commented folds and replacement of the got microbes, mostly because there are more studies that are examined that in humans and because of the direct relationship that's been established between doing that and reducing negative markers within the and I should mention the longer lines of repair and recovery. I put out a question on twitter the other day. I said, what do you want to know about alcohol? And more than a thousand questions and takes some more of those questions to later in the episode.

But one of the things I noticed is that many of the questions, hundreds, in fact, related to the question of, well, if I drank a lot previously, am I doomed? Can I reverse the negative effects or trying to drink? Lassen, i'm trying to improve my health. As I, as I do that, what should I do? Well, certainly focusing a bit on the got microbiome ought to be useful.

The other thing I should mention is, as people win themselves off alcohol, even if they're not full blown alcoholic or alcohol use disorder, they should understand that that increase in court is all that we talked about earlier that leads to lower stress, stressed hold and greater feelings of anxiety. Stress that's going to be present and it's onna take some time to dissipate. So for some people, that might even just be helpful to realize that as you try and win yourself off alcohol, or maybe even go called turkey, that increase anxiety and feelings of stress should be expected.

And in that case, I would point you to an episode that we did on master stress. You can find that again, if you have been lab on, it's got a ton of behavioral, nutritional supplementation based, exercise based, expose exerted behavioral. But a lot of tools, you can navigate to those easily because we have time stamp cy and go right to the topic of interest.

Those tools are going to be very useful and trying to clamp or control your stress. And the point here is just that some increase in stress should be expected and IT should be expected because of that increase in court. Is all that occurs with even low level consumption, yet chronic alcohol consumption.

Now i'd like to talk about a fairly common phenomenon, which is post alcohol consumption. Malays also referred to as hangover. Hangover is a conStellation of effects ranging from headache to nadia to what sometimes called the hands iee, which is anxiety that follows a day of drinking.

Anxiety, I think we can understand physiologically if we think about that process of alcohol intake, increasing amount of court all, and the ratio of court is all to some other stress hormone. Es, that well explains why some people wake up the day after even the day, the day after a night drinking and feel anxious and not well and stressed for reasons they don't understand. So if you're somebody who experiences hang xiety, then again, I refer you to the master stress episode that we put out some time ago.

And you can find that you from lab dot com tools to deal with things, I D tools to deal with stress, ranging again, from behavioral to nutritional supplement based IT said a that, of course, is not justification for going out and drinking so much that you get hangs I D induced hangover. But for those of you that are experiencing positive alcohol consumption hanani ety as IT were, that could be a useful resource, because I certainly don't want anyone experiencing an uncomfortable amount of anxiety. And there are great tools and resources for that.

Now the other aspects of hangover, such as the stomach ache or headache, or feelings of malaise or fogies, those could be related to a number of different things and probably are related to a number of different things. First of all, the sleep that one gets after, even just one, yes, even just one glass of wine or a beer is not the same sleep that you get when you don't have alcohol circulating in your system. And not trying to be a downer here, but this was discussed in the human lab podcast episode where I had doctor matti Walker from, you see, berkeley and course.

Doctor Walker is a world expert in sleep, runs one of the permanent laboratory studying sleep in its effects, wrote the incredibly book why we sleep and so on. Doctor Walker told me, and it's certainly supported by lots and lots of quality peer views, studies in animals and in humans, that when alcohol is present in the brain, in bloodstream, that the architecture sleep is disrupted, its slow wave sleep, deep sleep and wrapped, I move in sleep, all of which are essential for getting a resorted night sleep, all disrupted. So for those view that are drinking a glass or two of wine or having a uh hard liquor drink or a beer in order to fall asleep to sleep, you're getting is simply not high quality.

Sleep are certainly not as high quality is the sleepy be getting if you did not have alcohol, your system course. When we're talking about hanover, we're talking generally about the consumption of more than just one or two drinks. Of course, for some people, one or two drinks is proudly ly sufficient to induce hanging over.

But for most people, it's gonna having three or four exceeding the their typical limit as it's called again, not the legal limit. That's a whole other business. But when one is just too much alcohol for them, one of the reasons they feel terrible the next day is because their sleep isn't really good sleep.

In fact, it's not even sleep. It's often considered suda sleep, at least that's what it's called in the sleep science field because people are in kind of a low level hip note kind of trance is not real sleep. They are multiple balls of waking up.

They may not even realize they're waking up multiple times. Okay, so there is the sleep in new effects. Then there are the disrupted gut microbial effects, some of which we talk about earlier. And now you understand the mechanism of alcohol destroying good, healthy got microbiota, which then leads to leaky god and things that sort.

But one could imagine, again, could imagine, and there are some evidence starting to support this, that again, ingesting low sugar for mental foods, or maybe in biotic or probiotics s to support, they got microbial might assist in some of the got related malay's associated with hanover. And the words get those got microbiota healthy again as quickly as possible. And maybe even before you're doing how those got microbiota healthy, I would hope that you do that.

I think everybody should be doing something to support. They are got microban e and whether not the injection of low sugar for mental foods daily, or at least on a regular basis, or injection of probiotic or probiotic, the gn microbial is so pant for so many different things in terms of hangover and had ache. We know that that caused by visual construction, the construction of blood vessels, that tends to occur as a rebound after night of drinking, alcoa can access a VISA dilecta can dilate the blood vessels.

Part of that is associated with the increase and so called para sympathetic tone. We have an atomic nervous system. It's got a sympathetic component.

These are neurons that make us more ert. And if they're very active, they make us very stress. There's also the area sympathetic aspect of the autonomic nervous system.

This is all just fancy geek. Speak for the parts of your brain and body, the nerve cells that make you very relaxed when you're very relax. There tends to be viso dilatation and allows for more movement of blood and other things through the bloodstream.

And alcohol tense induce some visor dillaway, at least in some of the capital beds. And then when the alcohol wears off, there is a basic construction and people get brutal headaches. That's why some people will ask for their thailand all, or advair or things like that.

This non steroid anti flaming aries, I should mention. There's a lot of literature coming out that some of these non steroid anti and filming drugs are not good for us for a number different reasons. The way they impact deliver, the way they impact the immune system and no surprise, the way they impact to get microbes. Um so i'm not want to tell you what medications to take or not take, but you certainly would want to do IT a quick web search of effects of non sterile entire fleetness ies and aspin before you start taking those or stop taking those for that matter. Generally, they will aleve headache, but they can often have other issues, including liver issues.

And keeping mind the night after drinking your liver is already taken a beating because of the need to deliver to convert alcohol from a civil aldea de into a state which is now a pathway that you will understand so i'm not certain in fact I believe it's not the Grace idea to burn in your liver further through the use of things um that are going to cause you to have to work harder metabolize things if the goal is simply to alleviate headache. There's a lot of kind of lower old school layer about how to relieve a hangover. We already talked about how eating food won't do that, but eating food will prevent the rapid absorb of even more along l into the bloodstream.

There is the law that one should simply ingest more alcohol. What terrible advice that is that's just going to delay and even worse, hang over. However, i'd be remiss if I didn't say that the reason that that myth came to be, or that I should say that truth came to be, because indeed, ingesting more alcohol will alleviate a hangover, but then a worse hangover will show up.

Reason that came to be is because industry. More alcohol will cause those constructed vessels, they are giving a headache to dialed again. But of course, ingesting more alcohol to relieve, hang over simply a bad idea, just don't do.

And I think this is called the hair of the dog approach. Maybe someone putting the sooner captions on youtube Whites called the hair of the dog, I can come up with a few ideas, but they're not. They're na be very good ones, and some of them would probably even be alright, ridiculous.

So do not adjust more alcohol simply to try and recover from a hangover. I know many people have tried that one before, but that's a terrible idea. Now one thing that you'll also hear out there is that deliberate cold exposure for instances, taking a cold shower might relieve hang over.

I find this one particularly interesting because we've done episodes on the benefits of deliberate cold exposure. We have an entire episode about that can find IT again. He even lab up com.

There are direct links to some of the tools related deliberate cold exposure. And we have entire newsletter on deliberate old exposure protocols. You can find on huberman lab docomo or neural network newsletter these, those of either interesting ice bas and cold showers and ways to leverage those.

You can find that there, what you won't find there is a description of how to use deliberate cool exposure for sacred treating hangover. But here I went into the energy, and I found something kind of interesting. There is some evidence that increasing levels of epinephrine, the bloodstream, can actually help with alcohol.

Clear that I was very surprising to me. And I want to point out, this is not a large, robust literature. But there's some evidence pointing to the fact that when levels of epinephrine renal in are raised in the brain, in blood stream, that some of the components of alcohol metabolize can be accelerated and some of the initiating effects of alcohol can be reduced.

So maybe this old school layer of taking a cold shower actually has something to IT. So, thinking about the use of deliberate cold exposure in order to reduce the effects of hangover, or to more rapidly clear alcohol from the brain bloodstream, I want to be very clear, and I want to emphasize your safety. The way to do that is to understand that alcohol lowers core body temperature.

okay? You can make people slightly hypo therm. It's gona drop core body temperature.

So if you were initiated and he went and got into a body of water, write a pool or a lake or something, first of all, that's extremely dangerous to do while you're neither right. People drowned all the time. People drowned.

They die as a consequence of doing that. So please don't do that. But also, if it's a very cold water, your core body temperature gonna drop even further. Now if you've heard the episodes that i've done a deliberate cold exposure previously, i've talked about how Normally when people are not interesting alcohol, they get into a nice bath or cold shower and their body temporary, initially depth, but then IT rebounds and increases. That's a process is going to occur when people do not have alcohol in their system.

When you have alcohol on your system, one of the reasons that you become hypothermia because there's a disruption in those hypothenuse c brain is in particular the brain area called the media preoptic area that regulates core body temperature. So it's not so much that alcohol makes you cold is that alcohol disrupts the central command centres of the brain that control temperature regulation, and that leads you to be slightly hypo. So if you then go get into a very cold lake, or you get into even a cold shower or an ice bath, there's the possibility of you going very, very far down the latter into very hypothermic territory.

And that can be very dangerous now in terms of dealing with hanging over when the alcohol has been largely cleared from your system. Well, that's where some of this old law combines with some of the modern science and says, well, if you can Spike a drennen and certainly getting into a nice bath, or getting into a cold shower, or any kind of cold body of water, provided you can do that safely, that will sharply increase your journal. And I should say you're dopamine that's been shown, and we've talked about this on the podcast before, you get these long extended increases.

Several hours of increases in development in from deliberate cold exposure is well documented in humans, by the way. So one could imagine using deliberate cold exposure as a way to accelerate the recovery from hangover, provided that done safely. I think there's no reason to not explore that.

And if you wonder what safely is and what temperatures to use, please check out the episode on deliberate cold exposure. Cold showers, therefore, might actually be one way to at least partially relieve, hang over. Certainly, the science from various places in the literature converged to say that, but again, be careful.

Please, please, please be careful not to get into cold water when you are initiated. It's absolutely dangerous for all the obvious reasons, and it's dangerous also for the non obvious reasons, not the least of which is the dramatic decreases in core body temperature that can make you dangerous. Ly, hypo therm, now, how would you go about using deliberate cold exposure to accelerate recovery from hangover? Well, there I would look to the kind of standard protocols of, you know, one to three minutes, or maybe in six minutes, if you can tolerate.

If you're really called adapted, you do seven or ten minutes in a cold shower, although that could be a lot. Most people are going to experience a sharp increase in evenement in a genuine and a long lasting increase in dobin from one to three minutes of deliberate cold exposure, ideally done, emersion up to the neck again. Do this safely.

Please, please, please. Or a cold shower. We're getting under the showers as much as possible.

How cold? Well, that's going a very person, a person, I suggest making IT as cold as is uncomfortable, such as you really want to get out, but you know, you can stay and safely without for us giving yourself of a heart attack because of the water is really, really cold. Of course you have a heart attack.

Most showers won't go that cold, probably. Again, please use caution. Spike your journal, Spike your dopamine.

Would deliberate cdd exposure safely. Other components of hangover that could be good targets for trying to alleviate hang over. And here I hope you are getting the picture because IT is accurate.

To say that hangover is a multifaceted enamel on is not like one molecule in one recept is a bunch of things happening in the brain body, but is the dehydration associated with alcohol? Alcoa, a diagram for multiple reasons, IT caused people to exit not only water, but also sodium. Sodium is an electoral light critical for the function of neurons.

So making sure that you have enough sodium peason, magnesium so got electrolytes is going to be important for proper brain function by the organ function, even for people they have just had one or two drinks the night before. It's likely that your electorate baLance and your fluid baLance is going to be disrupted. And that's because alcohol also disrupts this so called VISA present pathway.

I talk a lot about these are present in the way that IT interacts with and controls different aspects of water, attention and water released from the body in the form of urine in the episode on salt. So you again, i'm referred to huberman lab doc com as the site where you can find that episode. Salt baLance and ways to restore electorate baLance.

Having your electoral lights at the proper levels before you drink is ideal. Some people will say, for every glass of alcohol that you drink, you should drink one glass of water. I would say Better would be two glasses of water, given the dehydrating effects of alcohol, and even Better would be water with electro lights that certainly would set you up for a Better day the next day.

And if you don't manage to do that, I suppose it's kind of geeky walk around with electronic packets. I'd at the bar what not although you know um geeky, my book is a good thing. The next day you could take some electrical lights upon waking, maybe even some before you go to sleep, the night of drinking.

So hangovers made worse by disrupt sleep, made worse by disrupted up my file, made worse by disrupted electoral lights, made worse by the depletion of epa and depine. That's why we're planchon the microbial with fermented foods, low sugar from mental foods, that is. That's why using safe, deliberate called exposure for spiking a journal and for increasing dopamine.

And that's why consuming electoral lives are all going to be beneficial. The folks over the examined that come a website that I really like because IT, that just has so much useful information, have assembled a list of things that have been proposed proportion to improve, or I should say, to remove the effects of hang over. And as they point out, and I would like to point out of, there isn't a lot of quality science to support the idea that anyone compound can eliminate hangover.

And that's probably because hangover, again arises from multiple organs and tissues and systems in both the brain and body none's. They have a terrific um list over there of things. Everything from japanese per fruit juice has been proposed to do this to some other really esoteric things, even things like you himine.

Frankly, when I look at the literature there and elsewhere, one simply cannot find the magic substance, the one urb, but the one potion that can wipe away hang over. Getting rid of hang over is going to be best solved by doing a collection of a small number of very powerful things, of which I already listed off a few. However, there are some additional things that one can do for relieving hang over.

And one of is to be very thoughtful about what sorts of alcohol one consumes. So I find this interesting. There have actually been studies of which types of alcohol lead to the greatest hankos.

There's actually a lot of legend in law about this as well. Some people have said, for instance, that drinks that have a high sugar content lead to greater hangovers. Turns out that not the case, at least that's out of the science points too. If you look at the expected hanging severity, what you find is that at the bottom end of the scale, there's a drink that i'm not going to tell you for the moment, but what you find is that near IT is, for instance, beer.

The the consumption of beer provided IT is not over consumption, right? It's not far beyond tolerance of the individual as one or two beers is less likely to cause a hangover than, say, whisky and a glass of whisky or I should you know, not as much whisky as beer, of course, but a glass of whisky for instinct is more likely to cause hang over than gin is IT turns out, again, this is what's fAllen out of the data. And yet, a glass of room or red wine is more likely to cause a hangover than any of the other things i've mention so far.

At the top, top, top of the list of drinks that induce hangover is bRandy. And one could then say, well, doesn't bRandy have a lot of sugar? Maybe it's the sugar that's causing hangover.

And this is something that's been, again, discussed over and over that people say, h, it's the high good drinks to cause hang over IT. Turns out, however, that when one looks at drinks, alcoa drinks and sugar content and hang over at the very bottom, the list is got. This makes me Christians to think about, is Ethanol diluted in orange juice? Kim, people actually drink us, but Ethanol iluma orange juice.

So this is not vodka and orange juice. okay. Voda was third on the list from the bottom of drinks that they do hanging over again. This is within amounts that are comfortable for the person to drink that they have enough experiences with her, that they have the body way to tolerate without getting very, very drunk.

So the point is that if I were sugar that's causing hang over, well, then the Ethanol dilute in orange juice would probably be at the top of the listen to in terms of inducing hang over. But it's not it's at the bottom of the list, and bRandy is at the top of the list. So what you find is that what scales from as an old deluded or shoes to bear the vocat to jin?

Here i'm assending the higher key of things that cause hang over gin, White wine, whisky, rum, red wine and then bRandy at the peak is all of the world heavyweight champion of hangover inducing drinks. Well, what's increasing our continuous within those drinks containers are things like night rides and other substance ces, that give alcohol it's distinctive flavor end that also lead to some of the initiating effects of alcohol. Now then you ask, okay, well, what is IT that these conventions are doing and what are these nature is doing? And guess what? Well, they do have effects on the brain and on other tissues.

Their main effects are to disrupt the got microbes. So what this points to, again, is that having a healthy got microbiome and perhaps ensuring that you bolster you got microbes the day after drinking is going to be especially important for warding off hangover, at least reducing the effects of hangover or the symptoms of hangover, or both. I would love to see a study on this.

I could imagine designing the study myself, although this isn't really the sort of things my laboratory does. But imagine some people getting probiotic and probiotic, some regularly, some just after drinking, or low sugar for mental foods, and see what the effects are in terms of subjective effects of hang over, but also some physiological measures. I think that way to think about hang over overall is that, again, IT represents a multifaceted multi organ, multi tissue phenomenon.

And the best way to deal with this is as a multi cell, multi tissue, multi chemical phenomenon. And before I listed off some of the things that one could do in order to adjust, hang over again, the one that comes out at the top of that list, I believe, is based on my rid of the data, is to support they got microbial, and certainly not to ingest more alcohol. And I suppose if we were to get really honest with one another and ask what's the best way to avoid to hang over IT would be to not drink in the first place.

So we've covered the major effects of alcohol that lead to the state that we call drunkenness or liberation. Again, there's a range. There be tipsy.

People can be black out drunk. People can be passed out drunk. We've also talk about hangover. And the fact is a multi acted phenomenon, and recovery from hangover involves a multifaceted process. Next time I want to talk about tolerance, tolerance.

Alcohol is a very interesting phenomenon that has roots mainly in the brain and in brain systems. There's not time in the world, let alone within this podcast, to get into all the aspects of tolerance. There are more than ten different types of tolerance.

There's functional tolerance, tonic tolerance, rapid tolerance. There's meta lic tolerance. There's psychological tolerance. Let's keep IT simple for sake of today's discussion.

And for those of you that are interested in learning about all the different types of tolerance and aspects of, there is an excEllent review. We will provide a link to this. This was publishing twenty twenty one.

So it's pretty recent in the journal pharmacology about chemistry and behavior, instantly or not. So instantly that was the first journalist ever publishing. So I have a particular affection for that journal, none's. IT is called tolerance to alcohol, a critical yet understudying factor in alcohol addiction. And while this paper does include alcohol addiction in the title is not just about alcohol addiction, here's the basic summary of what tolerance is.

First of all, tolerance refers to the reduce effects of alcohol with repeated exposure, and this is caused mainly by changes in your transmitter systems in the brain that are the direct consequence of the taxation of alcohol that alter hide molecule that we talked about before. There's enormous number of chemicals that change with repeater exposure to L L alder hide everything from gaba to dob a certa e and second messenger systems at denoisel on and on, rather than going to each of those in detail, I just want to talk about the contrary of the reinforcing and the tolerance inducing effects of alcohol. What do I mean by that? Well, here we are back to our old friend, meaning the molecule that comes up over and over again in these podcast episodes, which is dopamine, whether not somebody has a previous position, alcoholism or not, whether not their experience drinker or not, when people initially started drinking, they are increases in dopamine, or what we call dopamine.

Gic transmission doping is involved in motivation. craving. IT creates a center of well being at increases energy, again, typically only at the beginning of alcohol exposure that occurs in most people as a sharp Spike, as a increase.

Again, if somebody does not have alcalde hydrogen es or has very low levels of the inside that convert that I see the allied into state and the metabolize alcohol, in other words, that they will feel sick and lousy in a way that will override any recognition of the dopamine release that be the people they are. Listen to this and just think alcohol just makes me feel sick. I don't like IT.

Okay, that's a specific subcategory of people, but most people experiences some sort of mild euphoria. Why so many people drink, right? That the current estimates are that in most countries and certainly in the U. S, as many as eighty percent of the adult legal drinking age population during alcohol in that number could be even higher now because in the last couple of years has been a trend towards increase alcohol consumption, especially in the wake of the pandemic and during the pandemic topic for another time. So there's an increase in dopamine and an increase in serotonin.

So it's come an increase in well being, an increase in mood, but its a very short lived increase very soon after and actually triggered by that increase is a long and slow reduction in dopamine and serotonin and related molecules and circuits. So basic, what you're getting is a blip of feel good, followed by a long, slow arc of feeling not so great, which is why typically people will drink again and again across the night. The key thing to understand about tolerance is that with tolerance, the duration of that long, slow reduction in dopy and serotonin gets even longer.

In other words, the negative effects of alcohol that happened after the initial feeling good extend longer and in fact, get more robust. However, there is also a reduction in the reinforcing properties of alcohol. There's a shrinking of the feel good blip that happens when one first in just alcohol, and this has been measured in animals and humans.

So the first drink that somebody has provided, they have enough alcohol, hydrogenated es, that doesn't make them feel nauseous and sick right away. They feel really good. And then as IT wears off, they feel kind of a laws, and they want to drink more.

So they might drink more with each subsequent drink, and even drinks on different nights, even different weeks. The amount of dopamine e that's released is reduced. The amount of certainly that's released is reduced.

So what you're getting is less and less of the reinforcing properties of alcohol, the feel good stuff, and more and more of the punishment pain signal aspects of alcohol. This is the countour of chemical released ed in the brain that was referred to by my colleague, the incredible doctor, anal lakey, who was a medical doctor. He wrote the incredible doping nation.

SHE was a guessed on this podcast, on to rogan, podcast on rituals pocket and several podcast world expert in addiction. And he talked about this pleasure pain baLance that extends beyond alcohol to things like sex and gambling and to other behaviors that can potentially become addictive, but certainly includes alcohol. So tolerance, IT seems, is a processing which people are ingesting more and more alcohol as an attempt to get that feeling of well being back.

But what they really getting is an extended period of punishment, of pain and of from the alcohol. And you might say, what? How does that relate to tolerance? What turns out what they do behaviorally? And when I say they, I mean, animals do this and humans do this, is they start drinking more and more in an attempt to activate those dopa cetonia neurons and receptors.

And as they do that, there is an increase in alcohol, hydrogen ines, to the ends. That metabolizes alcohol is increased because the body and liver have to contend with all that alcohol. So now you've got, again, the two hit model. You're getting less of the feel good chemicals, more of the negative chemical release or pattern of of subjective feeling, I should say, and your metabolize alcohol more quickly and more readily, but is not taking you to a Better place in terms of how you feel. That's one of the major underlying reasons for what we call tolerance.

So if hear somebody who drinks and you notice that the feeling that you are seeking with alcohol is now requiring an additional drink or drinks, plural, chances are you are disrupting the dopamine and so erotic systems of your brain, and you are doing that in a way that is increasing the the pain and punishment signals that follow alcohol in gestion. And again, that's not just on the night you're drinking, but afterwards as well. Is that all bad news? Well, pretty much.

But the good news is that if you have stained from drinking for some period of time, then of course these systems reset. How long you need to abstain will depend on how much you are drinking and how long you are drinking for. Certainly, people have alcohol use disorder or alcoholic.

Their main goal should be to quit alcohol completely. I know there's some debate about this, and I don't want to get into that debate because i'm certainly not going to trying to reject anyone's recovery. Their expert um councillors and and mds and people can work with people.

In fact, for some very heavy drinkers and people with serious alcohol use disorder, going cold turkey that is stopping drinking completely can actually be medical dangerous. So the path severity for certain people looks different than the path tisean ity for other people. What i'm referring to hear for people that are interesting, again, somewhere between, on average, one or two drinks per night, whether not that's done night tonight or whether not that's condense to weekend use.

I know a number of people are going to ask, perhaps are screaming, is drinking good for me in any way? For instance, many people have probably heard that resveratrol is good for people, that red wine is enriching. Revert all I hate to break into you, but the reality is that if indeed revert, ual is good for us.

And there's some debate about this. Some people say strongly yes, some people say no. Other people say maybe the amount of red wine that one would have to drink in order to get enough respiratory ual in order for IT to be healthy promoting is so outrageous, ously high that they would surely induce other negative effects that would offset the positive effects of ritual.

So I wish I could tell you different. Again, i'm not here to be the Better of bad news, but the statement I just made was confirmed by doctor David and Clair when he was a guess on this podcast, confirmed by other researchers who work on with all related pathways. I wish I could tell you that red wine is good for your health.

And indeed, IT might be through some other mechanisms. So insist there have been studies of low to moderate red wine consumption. This would be anywhere from one to four glasses per week.

And I don't mean enormous glasses as I mean six ounce glasses of red wine. And those cases, some of the stress reduction that can be induced by a consumption of red wine, maybe some of the other micrometers inc. Components within red wines, in particular red wines that come from particular grapes.

And this gets really nuances and Frankly, is not well worked out in the peer reviewed literature, certainly not clinical trials, at least not i'm aware of. Tell me if you aware of a great clinical trial on this, well, there may be some positive effects of that very low level of consumption. I'm not trying to take away anybody is red wine on a trying to take away anybody's anything.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn't tell you that rest spiritual, as the argument for drinking and drinking red, one in particular, is just not a good one, is just not supported by the peer view research, a few other things about alcohol and health. The beginning of the episode I reference the city, showing that indeed not just heavy alcohol consumption of twelve to twenty four more drinks per week, but also light to moderate alcohol consumption of any type wine, beer, spirits. SATA does reduce the thickness of the brain.

IT really does reduce cortical thickness, in fact, and actually scales with the amount of alcohol that people drink. And this has been well documented in a number of different studies. I can provide a link to several of these.

One of the more striking ones actually shows that there's almost a dose dependent increase in drinker of gray matter volume and in these White matter tracks, these x ones, these wires as IT would that connect different neurons as a function of how much alcohol people drinking. And that's also what's been seen in this recent study that I reference at the begin and that in the showing te captions. So again, probably the best amount alcohol to drink would be zero glasses per week or answer per week.

For those of you drinking low amounts of alcohol, make sure you're doing other things to promote your health. And for those of you are drinking moderate and certainly for those of you that are heavy drinkers, please do everything you can to move away from that to quit entirely. But even for the moderate consumers of alcohol, you are going to want to be aware of some of the negative health effects and do things to offset those if indeed you're not going to stop drinking or reduce your intake.

One of the really bad effects of alcohol, but that's extremely well documented, is the fact that alcohol, because of this toxicity of a sea elder hide and related pathways, can alter DNA athletes and can alter gene expression. That can mean many things in different tissues, but IT is asia with a significant increase in cancer risk, in particular breast cancer and impartial killer, because breast tissue is presented both males and females, but in women is especially vulnerable to some of the DNA method. Tion changes.

Well, breast cancer in women has a relationship to alcohol take, and alcohol intake has a relationship to breast cancer in women. In fact, there has been proposed to be a anywhere from four to thirteen percent increase in risk of rest cancer for every ten grams of alcohol consumed. How much is ten grams? Well, there we need to think a little bit about the variation in the amount of alcohol in different drinks across the world.

Different countries serve different size drinks and have different concentrations of alcohol in those drinks without going down too much of a rabid hole and just giving you some good rules of thun to work with, there been studies of the percentage of alcohol, including different drinks, and the sizes of different drinks that are served in different countries. And here's kind of a patchwork of of those findings in japan, one beer, one glass of wine or one shot of liquor, as IT served their tents, include anywhere from seven to eight grams of alcohol. In the U.

S, one beer, which generally is twelve hounds. If it's in a bottle, one glass wine or shot of liquor tends to include about ten to twelve grams about alcohol. And in russia, one drink of the very source I just described typically will have as much as twenty four grams of alcohol because of the differences in the concentration of alcohol and the sizes of drinks that are poured in these different countries.

Okay, course, there are other countries in the world. Those countries are also vitally important, but those are the ones that extracted from the studies that I could find. What does this mean? Well, what we're talking about is that for every ten grams of alcohol consumed, so that's one beer in the U.

S. May be a little bit more than one beer in japan or basically a third of a drink in russia. There's a four to thirteen percent increase in risk of cancer.

That's pretty outrageous, right? And you might think, wait, how could I be that you know, this stuff is even legal? Well, look, it's as I describe before, it's a toxin.

It's also a talks that people enjoy the effects of I mean, in the U. S, at least they tried prohibition. Um that certainly did lead yes, did lead to a reduction in alcoa, induce health disorders in particular saros.

Is that deliver IT also LED to a lot of crime because IT became a substance that a lot of people still wanted and that people were willing to break the law in order to provide, I should say, to sell and provide. But the point is that the more alcohol people drink, the greater the increase of cancer, in particular breast cancer. And that's because of the fact that alcohol has these effects on sales that include changes in gene expression.

And cancer, that is, the growth of tumors, is a deregulation in call cycles, right? A tumor is a aggregation of the aggregation. Is stuff taking together, by the way, prolifically, is stuff duplicating a proliferation aggress of cells that could be a glioma glial cells glioma brain tumor, right? Could be limper a.

So within an lima tissue, etta, the mutations that alcohol induces to cause this are wide ranging. Some of those are starting to start to be understood for those who either interest in cell biology or just mention that the P. D one pathway.

Again, this is a super uh, specializing for the office auto s only. You don't need to know this. The P D one pathway seems to be up regulated.

And and we knew this from the discussion earlier. There's a dow regulation in some of the anti and flaming molecules that helps the press. This deliberation of cancers nowadays is a lot of interest in the fact that the immune system is constantly combatting cancers that existing us all the time.

You know, little, little tumor start growing. Our immune system goes and gobbles s them up. Little tumor start growing the immunity stem senses inflation. Tion sends out these incredible cells, these killers, b cells and t cells, and and beats them up. Cancers proferred and take hold and cause serious problems.

When the proliferation of cells exceeds the immune systems ability to gobble up and remove those cells, there are other mechanisms are regulating cancer, but that's one of the primary one. And alcohol hits IT again. As a two hit model, IT increases tumor growth and IT decreases the sorts of molecules that suppress in combat tumor growth.

So again, even load moderate amounts of alcohol can be problematic for sake of cancers, in particular breast cancers. Epidemiologists and help specialists love to try and compare different substances in terms of how bad they are really do they compare substances in terms of how good they are um but sometimes they do and what they will sometimes tell you. And what you can find in the literature is that ingesting ten fifteen grams of alcohol day, so that would be like one beer in the U.

S. One last of wine is the same as smoking ten cigarettes a day. Frankly, it's hard to make that direct relationship really stick because, you know, it's a question of how long people in hale do they ever pretty position to a long cancer IT.

But even if that number is off by plus or minus to cigarettes, or even if that number with the equivalent of one glin equals one cigarette te per day, I think there's general consensus now that nickey consumed by jigging or by cigarette is bad for us in terms of lung cancer and other forms of cancer. And for some reason, I don't know why, because this knowledge about alcohol and cancer in these established relationships have been known since the late one thousand nine eight. The first, you know, landmark paper on this was published in one thousand nine hundred eighty seven.

I can provide a link to that pair. It's actually quite interesting to read. Well, the relationship is there and yet we don't often hear about IT, right? In fact, in before researching the epo de, i'd heard before that alcohol can increase cancer risk.

But I wasn't aware of just how strong that relationship is because of the serious nature of what we're talking about and because I would hate to be confusing or misleading to anybody. I wanted to emphasize that this statistic that there is a four to thirteen percent, depending on what study you look at, a four to thirteen an increase in the risk of cancer, in particular breast cancer, for every ten grams of alcohol consumed. That's ten grams per day.

So that's one drink per day. But I do want to emphasize that if that equates to seven drinks per week and all those seven drinks are being consumed on friday and saturday is still averages to ten grams per day. And I also want to emphasize that there are all things that people can do to at least partially offset some of the negative effects.

Alcohol, as IT, relates to predisposition to the formation of certain kinds of tumors and cancers. I also want to be clear before I say that, that doing the things i'm about to tell you is not a guarantee that you are not going to get cancer, nor is that a guarantee that alcohol is not going to lead to an increased previous position for certain kinds of cancers. And the two things are consumption of fully and other b vitamins, especially be twelve know that the consumption of for late N B twelve has been shown to decrease cancer risk in people that in just alcohol, but not completely offset IT.

Why that is isn't exactly clear. IT probably has something to do with relationship between flaid and be twelve and other b vitamins in gene regulation pathways that can lead to tumor growth. At some point soon we will get in expert in cancer biology, and in particular in breast cancer biology on the program.

And we can ask me about this, but I realize this is going to raise a number of questions and maybe you can call some of you to go out there and start taking full laid. Another be vitals and be twelve. Not incidentally, a lot of the reported hang over supplements and treatments have included for late and b twelve.

I don't know if they had the cancer literature mind when they created those supplements and and products. I doubt they did. Alcohol really does disrupt b vitamin pathways, both synthetic pathways and utilization pathways. So sometimes you'll hear, oh, you know, if you get your b items that helps you recover from from hand over more quickly, again, the literature doesn't support that. But also, again, there are a lot of studies.

But more to the point, as IT relates to alcohol and the formation of tumors and cancers, IT does appear that decreased full, late and other divisions like me twelve are partially responsible for the effect of alcohol and increasing cancer risk. And IT does appear that consuming adequate amounts of fully in b twelve might again might partially really a bold face and underline and highlight partially offset some of that increased risk. There's an additional category that I want to highlight, of course, and this is vitally important to state, even though it's obvious, which is that people who are pregnant should absolutely not consume alcohol.

Fetal alcohol syndrome is well known and established. Its terrible fetuses experience diminished brain development that often permanent, diminished ed in development, diminished organ development in the proofing, meaning the heart along as deliver IT. Ingesting alcohol while pregnant is simply a bad idea.

And the reason I say this at all is, first of all, it's important to include an episode like this, but also because we can look at two things. First, while we can look at mechanism, and then we can also look at some of the law that still sadly exist out there. Let's take out the law that sadly exists first.

If you look online, you will sometimes be able to find, sadly, that some people believe that certain kinds of alcohol are not detrimental to fetuses. They'll say, well, shame, pain is safe for a pregnant mother to drink, but beer is not. That is absolutely, categorically false.

Alcohol is alcohol. There is no evidence whatsoever that consuming certain type of alcohol is safer for fetus than others. Alcohol a toxin, and the reason fetal alcohol syndrome exists is because the ability of that toxin to disrupt ellar processes, remember tumor growth, and the way that alcohol can accelerate tumor growth by proliferation of cells, the wrong cells, the ones you don't want to deliberate.

Well, all of embro ic development, all of feedle development, it's not the growth of a tumor. It's obviously the growth of an embryo, and it's done in a very orchestrate way. I started off studying brain development. That's where I got my beginnings in neutral logy, and I still teach biology to medical students and graduate students.

The set of coordinated processes that has to take place from conception to birth in order to give rise to a healthy embro is so so dynamically controlled and so exquisitely precise with checkpoints and recovery mechanisms and redundancy in the genes that are expressed to make sure that if anything goes wrong, it's repared at that. Alcohol, as a mudgal have been used that word yet, but a substance that can mutate D, N, A through alterations in D, N, A methylation in these checkpoints, in the circle. cle.

Alcohol, a mutagion, is one of the worst things that a developing embryo can be exposed to. And again, because it's water soluble and fat soluble in gestion of alcohol, when people are present, passes right to the feed. As now I realized that a number of people out there might be, think, oh goodness, you know, I didn't realize I was pregnant until a certain stage of pregNancy and before I realized I was ingesting alcohol.

Obviously, one can't undo what's been done. But I want to also emphasize that field alcohol syndrome. Well, yes, there's a full blown syndrome that manifests changes in the cranium, official development that are very obvious.

And you can look these are you probably seen these before the pictures before? Rather ask with ice spacing, forehead size, a number of other features of the cranial facial development. And of course, that's going on in the brain too. It's along a continuum. So IT is possible that some of the changes that occur, our more minor and thankfully, the Young brain, in particular the early post atal brain, is incredibly plastic.

There are things that can be done in order to help recover the all circuits that didn't develop well, I said a but even though it's somewhat obvious or should be obvious, I really want to make clear that there is zero evidence whatsoever that certain forms of alcohol are safer for pregnant women to interest in others. Absolutely wrong. No one whose pregnant should be ingesting alcohol whatsoever.

And certainly, if people feel like they can't avoid alcohol while pregnant, they really need to work with somebody to make sure that IT just absolutely doesn't happen because is so detrimental to the developing fetus. Lastly, I want to talk about the effects of alcohol on hormones, and I want to distinguish between low amount of alcohol intake, higher amount of alcohol intake, and again, this chronic alcohol intake versus occasional, versus really chronic accuse, meaning alcoholic or alcohol cused disorder where people are drinking, and immense amount on an ongoing basis. The literature on alcohol and hormones is quite extensive.

And there, of course, many, many different types of hormones, the hormones that most often get mentioned. And talk about on this podcast of the hormones to stop an asteroid, which are president, both men and women, that in both men and women are important for things like leto, the also responsible for sexual development, actual development of the genitalia before birth and after birth. The responsible, for instance, stroganoff important for memory and cognition.

You never want to drop estero en to low and or women because they can disrupt gnc and joint health eeta. To keep this discussion relatively constrained, it's fair to say that alcohol, and in particular the toxic metabolite of alcohol, increase the conversion of testosterone to estrogen. Now this occurs in a number of different tissues.

This is not just occurring in the tests of males. This is occurring a lots of different issues. And I will refer you to excEllent review, will provide a link in the shown up captions.

This is a paper that was publishing the year two thousand, but the data is still quite strong. The journal is called of all things alcohol. This, yes, literally a journal called alcohol for the publication of data and reviews on alcohol, its effects and the title, the papers.

Can alcohol promote a robotization of android to estrogen, a romanization, this process of the conversion of testosterone and other androgen to through things like a roman ensign. And this is a beautiful review that describes every tissue, or near every tissue, from the over in females to the plasencia, to the liver, to the tests in which alcohol can increase the arrow modification of teston desta. Now in females, this may be part of the reason why there's an increase in estrogen related cancer.

Breast cancer can be either estrogen related or non extradition related there. Other types as generated cancer outside of breast cancer. But IT appears that one reason why alcohol increases the risk of breast cancer is because of this aroma zone from of disaster, excuse me, to estrogen.

In males, accelerated or abNormal conversion of testosterone on gesture can actually lead to growth of the breast tissue. Emails so called dinner katia, or other effects of high estrogen, or I should say, of altered testosterone s rogen ratios, because that's really what's important. And these can include things like the minor sex drive, a increase fat storage in a number of other things that I think most people I would find to be negative effects.

I wants to talk about the fact that drinking alcohol can incase the romance ization of tester to extradite. I posted that online and I didn't get attacked, but I did um get criticize for the fact that IT has been shown yes, has been shown that small amounts of alcohol gestion so five grams or so of alcohol conditions to be half a glass of wine or hf a glass of beer, at least in some studies showed increases in testosterone, which was kind of surprising. But I should point out other studies have shown that alcohol and gestion causes decreases in test stone over time.

So there's always this issue, whether not you're looking a study of acute exposure versus chronic exposure of one dose versus multiple doses and exposure. I think it's fair to say, based on my read of the leadership, this review and other reviews that focus more particularly on humans, that regular in gestion of alcohol is going to increase estrogen levels, whether not your male or female. And it's largely doing that through the romanization process by increasing the omitted and time.

Yes, there are some dose dependence. But I think if you're somebody who is trying to optimize your testosterone to esterton ratio regardless of whether or not your male or female, well, then most certainly you're going to want to avoid drinking too much alcohol. So we've covered a lot of topics and data related to the mechanisms of alcohol hangover tolerance, cancer risk at seta.

I acknowledged that i'd mainly talk you about the negative effects of alcohol. I want to acknowledge that many people enjoy alcohol in moderation or even light drinking, the occasional drink, or the occasional two drinks, or maybe even, on average, one drink per night, so seven drinks per week. I'm certainly not here to tell you what to do and what not to do.

I do find IT immense interesting, however, that, first of all, alcohol is a known toxin to the cells of the body. Some of you might immediately say, well, wait, what about horne's? What about this phenomenon where if we regularly and just a talks in IT makes us stronger in others, what doesn't tell us makes us stronger?

There's you know some reason to believe that might be beneficial in terms of some forms of seller resilience. Maybe maybe no, sorry, IT doesn't work that way. There are all processes of hormones in which, for instance, exposing yourself safely to increases that in trentine ice baas or other things that increase a journey can raise your so called stress threshold.

But here we're talking about seller stress and damage to cells. So my read of the literature, and again, this is my read, and I invite others to you, provide studies, or I would prefer actually collections of studies that point in the direction, if they exist, that alcohol can be beneficial. But my read of the literature, or I should say, my understanding of what I would call the centre of mass of the literary on alcohol, is that no consumption, zero consumption, consumption of zero answers of alcohol is going to be Better for your health than low to moderate consumption of alcohol.

And that low to moderate consumption of alcohol is going to be Better for you, of course, than moderately high to high alcohol consumption. On the order of twelve to twenty four or more drinks per week, I realized that for most people listening to this, it's probably low to moderate alcohol consumption. That is part of their standard repartee. And i'm not here to give you justification for doing that, nor am I going to tell you not to do that.

I would like you to consider perhaps, however, the negative effects that we understand and that are documented, for instance, the negative effects of alcoa and got microbiome and the things that you can do to Better support, you're got microbiome negative effects on the stress system that H P A access that we talked about earlier in the fact that even load a levels of alcohol consumption can increase our levels of stress when we're not drinking. And to think about acquiring some tools and, you know, getting some proficiency with tools, behavioral or otherwise, that can help you with stress modulation that don't involve alcohol consumption. Again, the point here is to illustrate where the problems lie with alcohol consumption.

But also what i've tried to do is to point you to some resources that can help offset some of those negative effects. Will they offset all the effects? I can't say that for sure, but certainly taking measures to offset some of the negative effects of any alcohol consumption that you might be having your doing is going to be beneficial to you.

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