Alcohol

by Tia Dewick in Nutrition

Alcohol

So, on this blog post we are going to discuss many peoples vice/guilty pleasure – ALCOHOL. So we all know that your trainer and coach probably tells you to avoid the stuff at all costs, but do you really know why?

So it is known that alcohol has many negative side effects on our body, but what are they? Well, in this blog I am going to be pointing out what alcohol really does to your body and why it may be having adverse effects on your training and consequently any results you may achieve from your training.

First off, CALORIES. Alcohol is full of wasted and empty calories for example for every gram of alcohol you consume you are consuming approximately 7 calories. So in every bottle of beer that makes it up to 154 calories. So say you drink 4 in one evening that’s the equivalent to eating a Big Mac burger! When consuming alcohol people don’t see it as having any calorific content because it’s a drink so they will eat their normal daily allowance and then have the alcohol on top, which therefore leads to them over consuming on their calories and therefore may lead to weight gain if done so regularly. The other negative with alcohol being so high in calories is that it does not have any nutritional value and does not fill you up – therefore your calories are wasted.

Secondly, alcohol can have a negative impact on your everyday bodily functions. Such as kidney function, our kidneys filter harmful substances from our blood; one of these substances is alcohol. Alcohol can cause changes in your kidneys functioning potential, by making it less able to filter your blood efficiently. One of our primary kidney functions is to regulate the amount of water in our body. As alcohol dehydrates our body, it can have a drying out affect which may harm our kidneys ability to keep our body hydrated correctly with water.
Chronic drinking may also lead to kidney disease; the rate of blood flow to your kidneys is usually kept at a regular rate, so that it can filter blood correctly.  Liver disease impairs this balancing act therefore, making it harder for the liver to complete its primary function.

Collectively, do you really believe that alcohol consumption is worth the long-term damage it can cause?