If you must drink, you'd better stop at two beers, a major new heart study suggests. More than that amount of alcohol daily may spike your blood pressure and may drain a vital nutrient, calcium from your body. The harmful effect shows up even if you take extra calcium supplements.
For average person, at more than two drinks a day, some bad things start happening physiologically. Your blood pressure goes up, and you begin to lose the benefits of the calcium in your diet.
ALCOHOLIC HEPATITIS
Nondrinkers and light drinkers who had higher calcium intakes also had corresponding lower blood pressure. Study warns those who averaged more than two alcoholic drinks a day suffered at least two bad effects:
1. The alcohol seemed to raise their blood pressure.
2. The drinking also seemed to prevent the blood pressure-lowering effects of calcium.
Previous studies show that drinking alcohol apparently leads to poor absorption of calcium in the intestines. In addition to this, a heavy drinker passes a lot of calcium through the kidneys in urine, draining the body's stores of calcium.
Heavy drinkers sometimes have bones that appear to be washed out in x-rays, because they lack calcium. That's added bad news for people at risk from osteoporosis, a bone-loss disease that strikes many women and some men over the age of 50.
You can't get around the bad effect of alcohol on blood pressure simply by taking more calcium every day. Regardless of the level of calcium or potassium in the diet, alcohol still had an independent (bad) effect. Alcohol seemed to be a much more powerful influence on blood pressure than either calcium or potassium.
The study recommends that you eliminate alcohol from your diet. Short of that, you should average two or fewer alcoholic drinks a day.
Heavy drinkers may be ruining more than just their liver. Excessive alcohol intake may severely damage the body's whole immune system, making it more susceptible to serious, even life threatening infections like pneumonia.
Heavy drinkers over a period of several years may drastically decrease the number of natural killer cells, the body's powerful defense against invading bacteria and viruses.
People who take more than an average bottle of alcohol a day much have higher rates of lung infections including tuberculosis than other people.
The drinking habit also greatly weakens the liver so that alcoholic subjects may be at increased risk of both hepatitis and HIV (AIDS) infections.
Alcohol Robs Your Body of a Vital Nutrient ALCOHOLIC HEPATITIS
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