If there’s one thing people love, it’s alcohol. You want to drink it, but also want to be hot and healthy. Allow me to teach you about how alcohol impacts your health and physique goals.
You’ll leave here going from a level one dork who only knows how to get wasted to a sophisticated drinker who understands exactly how alcohol works in detail. Let’s get into it.
When we’re talking about alcohol, we’re really talking about ethanol which is the chemical compound that gets you tipsy. Alcohol is made when yeast digests the sugar in carb sources like grapes to make wine or grains to make beer for example.
Many people drink alcohol to take the “edge” off of life. More specifically, alcohol reduces consciousness and inhibition making people think less about troubling thoughts (1). It also makes bad dancers decent. Thus, alcohol can reduce anxiety temporarily, but also at the cost of impairing judgment (2).
By definition, alcohol is a toxin or poison in your body (9,10). Your body can’t store it which is hilarious when people say alcohol turns into fat because your body doesn’t alcohol at all.
Because of this, your body immediately uses your liver to burn it off (3).
As your liver fights off alcohol, a war is essentially waged which raises your risk of a fatty liver (4).
Fortunately, fatty liver disease is reversible, but it can be developed with as little as half an ounce daily, thus wear and tear on the liver can accumulate with frequency (5,6). Furthermore, heavy drinkers can develop cirrhosis where liver cells perish while the liver scars up into a wrinkly useless tissue (7,8). Unfortunately, Cirrhosis is irreversible.
Alcohol also impairs brain function with moderate use and can damage your brain with heavy use (12, 13). This effect is more pronounced in nutrient deficient individuals (14). Furthermore, blackouts are a sign, you’ve drank enough to negatively alter brain function (15).
If you drink chronically during older life, your brain essentially gets poisoned. It can shrink and risk of dementia can skyrocket (16-21).
Alcohol also increases blood pressure and negates/reduces some of the cardio/metabolic benefits of fat loss (22,23,24).
Because the risk outweighs any potentially minor health benefit, alcohol is not inherently healthy especially for those with poor health and pre-existing issues (11).
However, how does these risks translate to death? Most long-term research can’t isolate alcohol’s true impact because some demographics with favorable qualities like education, income, and self-control also drink (25).
When you crunch together all the studies for a risk threshold, it appears that drinking 1-2 drinks no more than 2-3 times per week puts you at lowest risk for all-cause mortality (26). Assuming you stay under 200 grams of alcohol per week, even a daily drink poses minimal risk to death, shaving off about half a year of life compared to non-drinkers (27).
However, chronically drinking more than 350 grams per week regardless of the frequency during the week can slice off at least 5 years off your life (27).
Many studies don’t control for exercise, so habitual exercisers are likely less at risk. All in all, small amounts will still have health impacts, but they likely don’t translate to anything significant if moderated in healthy individuals.
Beyond basic health, let’s see how alcohol impacts fat loss. As mentioned before, alcohol is perceived as toxic to your body. Thus, your body ceases fat burning to burn off the alcohol (28). Fat burning only returns once the alcohol is burned off. However, the fat that would’ve been burned off while alcohol burning takes place still gets stored.
Long term, alcohol can only cause net fat gain if you consume it in a caloric surplus aka an excess of total calories. However, if you burn more total calories than you store over time, you can still lose fat regardless if alcohol makes up any percentage of those calories (29,30,31). This is why anybody who understands basic physics isn’t shocked at the occasional headlines of people losing weight drinking nothing but alcohol (32).
However, what’s possible in theory isn’t so practical in the real world. Why’s that?
Well, while alcohol isn’t inherently fattening, alcohol increases your appetite. Research finds both low and high alcohol consumption increases your appetite, usually by a few hundred calories (33-36).
So the alcohol itself might not directly make you fat, but greasy bar food catching your eye can. You’ll likely end up eating more wings and mozzarella sticks than intended, especially in a social setting.
Not to mention, alcohol is a piss poor investment of calories compared to other choices if nutrients and satiety are a concern.
Grab my free checklist on how to defeat your worst food cravings
Fellas, alcohol is directly toxic to your balls and alcohol abuse can easily shrink your testicles (37,38,39). That’s not clickbait. It suppresses your brain’s signal to produce testosterone, converts testosterone to estrogen in the liver, reduces nitric oxide production which reduces blood flow, damages testicle cells, increases cortisol (stress hormone), and reduces growth hormone production (39-44). Well, that was a mouthful.
Anyways, with heavy drinking (4-8 drinks), testosterone can drop as much as 40% with recovery usually taking days (45-50).
We’ll go over how this impacts muscle growth later, but testosterone drops will impact many things for men, most notably, sexual health.
In long term studies, light drinking seems to be ok, but moderate to heavy drinking puts you at risk for erectile dysfunction (51,52). So endless beer with the boys will tank your bedroom life with the Mrs.
Alcohol attacks a man’s balls, but because women don’t have balls (ummm duh), females don’t experience sex hormone detriments.
Besides the universal health detriments to the liver and some other metrics mentioned earlier from heavy drinking, female are essentially immune hormonally. In fact, testosterone and estrogen benefit slightly from alcohol in females, both of which control female sex drive and muscle growth.
Testosterone and estrogen seems to go up with even as much as 8 drinks in females (53-62). Acutely, women can benefit hormonally from alcohol and avoid sex hormone side effects.
These effects can increase a women’s desire for sex, but at higher doses, it also reduces the experience by reducing vaginal pulse pressure and vaginal blood volume along with reducing genital pleasure (82).
Alcohol can impact the boobs as well.
Breast cancer risk follows alcohol consumption in a dose response (63,64,65). Unfortunately, research finds, many women even older women are oblivious to this risk (66).
So while females clearly have less to lose hormonally from alcohol, there are still relevant reasons women should still monitor their alcohol intake.
Because testosterone signals for the muscle growth pathway, alcohol blunts hypertrophy (67,68,69). Muscle protein synthesis (MPS) rates drops more in men than women (70).
MPS drops by 37% post workout with alcohol alone. You can salvage this a bit by having protein alongside alcohol, but MPS will still drop by 24% after about 9 drinks (71).
So heavier drinking seems to be detrimental and can negate some muscle growth in men.
Should you hit the gym after a night of drinking? Probably. Your performance will likely be fine as long as you’re not hungover. Training performance and even some metrics of adaptations are unphased even from 8 drinks in larger men (72-77).
One study did found 6 drinks reduced eccentric strength recovery by 11%, so there is likely some recovery risk when you’re drinking moderate to heavy amounts (78).
Furthermore, if alcohol calories displace carbohydrate calories, glycogen (stored sugar for performance) replenishment is compromised (81).
So while the short term effects of alcohol on recovery/performance are minimal to non-existent, there is likely a long term detriment due to higher cortisol, lower testosterone, lower protein signaling, compromised glycogen stores, dehydration, and worst sleep quality (72,73).
Alcohol poses some degree of risk. I think there is merit to limiting it and even going through seasons without it like dry January. However, many people want to strike a balance between being able to drink and still being relatively healthy. For fitness enthusiasts, they also want to drink while building muscle or losing fat.
So here are some basic guidelines to do so:
Here’s a cute graphic for any macro trackers to ensure you’re tracking alcohol correctly. It’s easier than most people think.
Furthermore, below are some low calorie drinks you can opt for if you’re trying to get/stay lean.
· Vodka soda – 133 calories in a 7.5-ounce (225-mL) serving
· White wine – 123 calories in each 5-ounce (150-ml) serving
· Hard seltzer – 99 calories in 12-ounce (355-mL) serving
· Tequila with lime – (42 mL) of tequila with a lime wedge has only 99 calories in total
· Light beer – 12-ounce (360-mL) can of light beer usually has about 104 calories
· Gin and diet tonic – 2 ounces (56 mL) of gin and 4 ounces (118 mL) of diet tonic water provides 128 calories
· Dry martini – 2.5 ounces (70 mL) of gin and 0.5 ounces (15 mL) of vermouth contains 185 calories
· Paloma – 169 calories, mix 1.5 ounces (42 mL) of tequila with 6 ounces (186 mL) of grapefruit juice, some ice, and a bit of lime juice
· Rum and Diet Coke – 7.5-ounce (225-mL) serving of rum and Diet Coke contains 135 calories
· Mojito minus the syrup – contain about 168 calories
· Light bloody mary – Premixed or packaged versions can range anywhere from 200 to 400 calories
· Light beer – Light beers tend to be around 50 calories less than regular brews.
· Rosé – 120 kcal
· Champagne – 90-96 kcal
· White wine – 121 kcal
· Kombucha with vodka – 90 kcal
· Red wine – 125 kcal
· Hot toddy – Less than 150 kcal
The topic of how alcohol impacts general health, male health, female health, fat loss, muscle growth, performance, and recovery are super nuanced. I’m too lazy to summarize everything, but in general if you’re a healthy individual, light or even moderate drinking occasionally isn’t that big of a deal.
So cheers to being able to have your wine and drinking it too.
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