One of my favorite Gurus of all time happens to be Dr. Gabe Mirkin who has been around since I started working in the fitness industry - close to 30 years! In his latest newsletter, one of his readers asks if it is OK to save up all of the drinks in a week and drink them in one day. Here is the question and answer (I felt that this subject was apropos to the Holidays):
Dear Dr. Mirkin: Is it OK to have two drinks a day and can I save them all up for a big party on the weekend?
No! Binge drinking doubles your risk of heart attacks. A study of 9,758 men in France and Ireland over a ten-year period shows that men who binge drink have nearly twice the risk of heart attacks and deaths from heart disease as regular drinkers, even though they drink about the same amount of alcohol per week. (British Medical Journal, November 23, 2010).
When you pour alcohol on a cut, it hurts because alcohol damages cells by dehydrating them. If you add a cup of alcohol to cup of water, you get far less than two cups of fluid because alcohol draws water into its cell structure.
The liver is the only organ that has acetaldehyde dehydrogenase, the enzyme that breaks down alcohol. The liver can break down alcohol at a steady rate of one drink per hour (a drink is 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine or 2/3rds of shot glass). The higher the blood level of alcohol, the more likely it is to damage cells.
Exceeding two drinks in a day can cause blood alcohol levels high enough to damage cells, increasing risk for heart attacks, impotence, cirrhosis of the liver, dementia, chronic pancreatitis, and certain cancers. However, up to two drinks per day has been associated in some studies with decreased risk for heart attacks.
Dr. Gabe Mirkin has been a practicing physician for more than 40 years and a radio talk show host for 25, Dr. Mirkin is a graduate of Harvard University and Baylor University College of Medicine. He is one of a very few doctors board-certified in four specialties: Sports Medicine, Allergy and Immunology, Pediatrics and Pediatric Immunology.
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