One Thing That Does Pair Well With Alcohol…
Alcohol is not a healthy thing to consume. That shouldn’t be a controversial statement, but there is a popular belief that it can be good for the heart:
Red Wine & The Heart: Can We Drink To Good Health?
The above is an interesting and well-balanced article that examines the arguments for health benefits (including indirectly, e.g. social aspects).
Ultimately, though, as the World Health Organization puts it:
WHO: No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health
There is some good news:
We can somewhat reduce the harm done by alcohol by altering our habits slightly:
How To Make Drinking Less Harmful
…and we can also, of course, reduce our alcohol consumption (ideally to zero, but any reduction is an improvement already):
And, saving the best news (in this section, anyway) for last, it is almost always possible to undo the harm done specifically to one’s liver:
Nanotechnology to the rescue?
Remember when we had a main feature about how colloidal gold basically does nothing by itself (and that that’s precisely why gold is used in medicine, when it is used)?
Now it has an extra bit of nothing to do, for our benefit (if we drink alcohol, anyway), as part of a gel that detoxifies alcohol before it can get to our liver:
Gold is one of the “ingredients” in a gel containing a nanotechnology lattice of protein fibrils coated with iron (and the gold is there as an inert catalyst, which is chemistry’s way of saying it doesn’t react in any way but it does cheer the actual reagents on). There’s more chemistry going on than we have room to discuss in our little newsletter, so if you like the full details, you can read about that here:
Single-site iron-anchored amyloid hydrogels as catalytic platforms for alcohol detoxification
The short and oversimplified explanation is that instead of alcohol being absorbed from the gut and transported via the bloodstream to the liver, where it is metabolized (poisoning the liver as it goes, and poisoning the rest of the body too, including the brain), the alcohol is degraded while it is still in the gastrointestinal tract, converted by the gel’s lattice into acetic acid (which is at worst harmless, and actually in moderation a good thing to have).
Even shorter and even more oversimplified: the gel turns the alcohol into vinegar in the stomach and gut, before it can get absorbed into the blood.
But…
Of course there’s a “but”…
There are some limitations:
It doesn’t get it all (tests so far found it only gets about half of the alcohol), and so far it’s only been tested on mice, so it’s not on the market yet—while the researchers are sufficiently confident about it that a patent application has now been made, though, so it’ll probably show up on the market in the near future.
You can read a pop-science article about it (with diagrams!) here:
New gel breaks down alcohol in the body
Want to read more…
…about how to protect your organs (including your brain) from alcohol completely?
We’ve reviewed quite a number of books about quitting alcohol, so it’s hard to narrow it down to a single favorite, but after some deliberation, we’ll finish today with recommending:
Quit Drinking – by Rebecca Dolton ← you can read our review here
Take care!
