There are many ways alcohol can put an extra strain on your body. Alcohol causes your body to release more stress hormones, which speeds up the aging process. It also affects the healthy functioning of your digestive system, making it harder for you to absorb essential nutrients. This includes vitamins A, B, D, and E; minerals like calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc; and even basics like proteins and carbohydrates.
Your Alcohol Consumption
Back in 2023, Hou and her team published a study assessing the effects of alcohol on biological age. “Our study is very unique because we focus on a group of healthy people who don’t have any disease yet. We recruited participants and followed them up for 35 years,” Hou says. She found that excessive drinking — more than 28 drinks a week for women — was linked to a 33% higher likelihood of having the age-related grey rings around the cornea compared to women who drank fewer than seven drinks a week. The risk of earlobe creases indicating aging was similarly 26%-36% higher among heavy drinkers than among light-to-moderate drinkers.
It Can Affect Your Heart
Several factors combine to make drinking — even at normal levels — an increasingly risky behavior as you age. After drinking the same amount of alcohol, older people have higher blood alcohol concentrations than younger people because of such changes as a lower volume of total body water and slower rates of elimination of alcohol from the body. That means the beer or two you could drink without consequence in your 30s or 40s has more impact in your 60s or 70s. While it wasn’t surprising that heavy drinking and smoking were linked to higher likelihood of early signs of aging, she also found that people who drank and smoked at moderate levels did not show any more signs of aging than people who abstained. The study, published in Alcoholism Clinical and Experimental Research, utilized five different epigenetic clocks, a measure of an individual’s biological age, and examined the effects of varying levels of alcohol consumption on biological age. The results show that the clock ticks faster among heavy alcohol drinkers but slower among light to moderate drinkers.
Your Body and Alcohol
You no longer need to disrupt your life in order to start drinking less. Certain medications and excessive alcohol can work in tandem to suppress or amplify the effects of the other. Alcohol can diminish the effectiveness of medications, and medications can amplify the effect of alcohol on the body. While the causal relationship between frequent and heavy alcohol consumption in older adults and cognitive decline is not certain, research has shown a correlation between the two, especially in men. It is never too late to get the help that you need for drinking. This is especially true when it comes to alcohol abuse and addiction.
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Drinking heavily and smoking for years are well-known features of an unhealthy lifestyle. I’ve always been healthy and fit, and I kid myself that a little poison can’t hurt me. But by pushing the 14-a-week limit at my age, I’m also pushing my luck. One of the best things you can do for your all-around health and appearance is to drink less alcohol. But at Ria Health, we recognize that this can be easier said than done.
Strategies to Protect Your Health if You Drink Alcohol
- Each participant submitted an average of 47 samples over 626 days, with the longest-serving participant submitting 367 samples.
- When you drink alcohol, it’s absorbed through the small intestine, processed by the liver, and circulated through your major organs.
- As you get older, you have less water in your body and — for reasons that aren’t quite clear –you also feel thirsty less often.
- Again, the reasons behind many of these effects are not always clear.
This can lead to immediate risks, worsening health conditions, adverse reactions with medications, and much more. However, some maintain heavy drinking patterns throughout life, and some develop problems with alcohol for the first time during their later years. The many challenges that can arise at this stage of life — reduced income, failing health, loneliness, and the loss of friends and loved alcohol makes you age faster ones — may cause some people to drink to escape their feelings. In the new research, published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, a group of Danish researchers took advantage of a large database of health information involving more than 11,000 Danes in the Copenhagen City Heart Study. The people in the study were followed from 1976 to 2003 and provided information about their eating, smoking and drinking habits.
- For example, young people who drink regularly have been shown to perform poorly in tests of executive function.
- The results showed that people who drank liquor, as opposed to beer or wine, were at greater risk of ageing faster.
- This causes the effects of alcohol to be stronger, even if you’re drinking the same amount you always have.
- Drinking heavily and smoking for years are well-known features of an unhealthy lifestyle.
- She found that excessive drinking — more than 28 drinks a week for women — was linked to a 33% higher likelihood of having the age-related grey rings around the cornea compared to women who drank fewer than seven drinks a week.
Around 81 percent of all the molecules they studied showed changes during one or both of these stages. Changes peaked in the mid-40s, and again in the early 60s, with slightly different profiles. Snyder and his colleagues noticed that there’s a very clear change in the abundance of many different kinds of molecules in the human body at two distinct stages. The progress of a human being through life might be thought of as a mostly gradual succession of changes from the ovum to the grave. The same amount of alcohol is likely to have a bigger impact in your 60s or 70s than it did in your 20s.
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