Nutrition Videos

Another question I hear all the time in my sessions with clients, but most recently I heard from a client I follow online who lives abroad. He asked me: "Doctor, can I drink alcohol?" We have repeatedly said that alcohol is not good for health because it is associated with damage to the blood vessels, the liver and the nervous system, especially the brain. So from a health point of view I generally discourage alcohol consumption and limit it to the minimum possible. I don't believe that complete avoidance of alcohol is ideal, but certainly consumption should not exceed the minimum. But let's say someone doesn't care about his health, but only cares about his weight. In this case, is there a need to avoid alcohol? Surely we all understand that alcohol has calories, because one gram of alcohol equals 7 calories which is slightly less than the calories of one gram of fat, so the amount in calories is not negligible. Also, alcohol, while it has almost as many calories as fat, unfortunately in our body it works like sugar, which has a much worse effect on metabolism than fat. If these are not enough to discourage you from consuming alcohol with food there is one more reason. Consuming alcohol with food makes you more likely to eat more and make poorer food choices. I'm sure for many of you this sounds obvious, but as always there is the relevant study. So they invited some people to participate in a study that they were told, as is usually done in these studies, that they would be participating in a research to evaluate new flavors of ice cream. As they waited for the ice creams to be served, half of the participants were served an alcoholic drink, while the other half were served a non-alcoholic drink. What the study showed, is that the subjects who consumed the alcoholic drink then consumed significantly more ice cream as part of the test. I can attest to this from my own experience, because I hear it over and over again as a problem for people trying to follow a healthy diet. If they are at a festive table and drink a little more, then the food that follows is much more in quantity and much worse in quality, while at the end the sweets are consumed in larger pieces and soon follows the well-known stomachache. This avalanche phenomenon can sometimes be avoided by making a small effort to consume minimal alcohol or even avoid it altogether. Remember this the next time you are at the festive table. Thank you very much.