• Taken from here:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkS1pkKpILY

Low to Moderate Amounts of Alcohol

• Drinking a lot is clearly bad for the brain (12-24 drinks per week or more)
  • 3-4 drinks per night every night of the week etc.
  • Causes neurodegeneration of the neo cortex
• Even for people that drink low to moderate amounts of alcohol.
  • One or two drinks per night on average (7-14 drinks per week)
  • Evidence of thinning of the neo cortex and other parts of the brain.

“Metabolism” and Empty Calories

• Water soluble and fat soluble
  • Can pass into all the cells and tissues in your body
• Ethanol - one type of alcohol
  • Toxic
  • Substantial damage and stress to cells
  • Must be converted to NAD
    • Acetaldehyde is poison
    • Damages and kills cells
  • Ethanol → Acetaldehyde → Acetate
    • Acetate can be used as food
• If the body can’t do this conversion fast enough
  • Acetaldehyde is built up and cause more damage in the body
• Empty calories
  • The entire process is very metabolic costly but there’s no real nutrient value
  • Can’t be stored in any beneficial way. No vitamins, no amino acids, no fatty acids.
  • Acetate is a terrible food source.
• In essence, when you ingest alcohol, some of it is being shuttled into energy and some of it is being shuttled into a poisonous substance.

Inebriation

• Inebriation is the effect of being poisoned by this substance.
• The range of effects of inebriation are subjective.
  • Some people get a real lift for a long time - these people are predisposed for alcoholism.
  • Have to be careful with the amount of drinking that they’re doing
• When alcohol gets into the brain
  • Has an affinity for particular brain areas
    • Slight suppression in the activity of neurons in the pre-frontal cortex
      • Disrupts top-down inhibition
      • More impulsive behavior
    • Memory formation and storage
  • Important point➖
    • There’s evidence that drinking regularly makes changes to the brains such that more impulsive behavior occurs outside the time that people are drinking.
    • And, when they drink, impulsive behavior gets even worse
    • This can happen from just one or two nights of regular drinking
      • Every Thursday or every Friday
    • It increases the number of synapses that controls habitual behavior and reduction in the number of synapses within the neural circuits that are controlling behavior.
      • Fortunately, this is reversible.
      • From 2 to 6 months these neural circuits return to normal.

Food and Alcohol Absorption

• Eating while inebriated doesn’t help.
• If you eat something prior to drinking alcohol or while ingesting alcohol
  • It will slower the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream
  • You won’t feel as drunk.
  • The inclusion of all protein, fats and carbs is the most prolific for this

Serotonin

• Responsible for mood and wellbeing
  • Studies have shown that serotonin levels can’t alleviate depression and depression-like symptoms. But there’s an important distinction to make:-
    • SSRIs can help alleviate depression probably by changing neural circuits. Neuroplasticity.
    • Serotonin levels alone can’t alleviate it, but the cascading effects of high serotonin apparently can.
• Alcohol and Serotonin
  • Alcohol disrupts those mood circuitry
    • At first making them hyperactive (feeling good after a few sips of alcohol)
    • After a while though, serotonin levels tend to drop
  • As people ingest more drinks there’s zero chance of them recovering that energized mood
    • Most people will start to feel more and more suppressed
    • There’s a depression of alertness and arousal.
  • There’s a subset of people, however, that become more alert.
    • These people have a genetic predisposition for alcoholism
    • Or they’ve built up such a tolerance
  • Everyone should know and recognize their own risk to alcoholism.