New Zealanders regularly exceed recommended alcohol guidelines . What does this mean for our health, and is all alcohol bad for you? If you’re wondering what 14 units equates to, in booze terms it adds up to about six glasses of wine or six pints of moderate-strength beer. While we should all realistically try to limit our alcohol consumption, how much we can tolerate does depend partially on our genetics .
If you love a cocktail or a few glasses of wine, it’s not all bad news, as research indicates there are some steps you can take to make your drinking a little more tolerable for the body. So let’s dive in – what does alcohol do to the body and why? The effect on the brain Alcohol has a potent impact on your brain chemistry, disrupting the balance of various chemical messengers which affects your feelings , thoughts, and behaviour. The first of these messengers to be impacted is called Gaba (gamma-aminobutyric acid), one of the reasons why alcohol is such an effective relaxant.
“Gaba acts like a sedative to calm the brain down, while another chemical called glutamate, excites the brain and makes it more active,” says Prof Anne Lingford-Hughes, an expert in addiction biology at Imperial College London. The more you drink, the more this balance between Gaba and glutamate becomes disrupted. The frontal parts of the brain, regions involved in attention and planning, are particularly sensitive to this shift which is why we become more impulsive and lose our inhibitio.
