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Chapter 1: What is the science behind how alcohol affects our bodies?
Hey, it's Jane Lindholm filling in for Ira and Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. We are on the precipice of summer right now, so that means the season for porch beers and happy hours is upon us. I myself am partial to a midweek near beer these days. You know, we nerds here at Science Friday have been thinking a lot about the science of alcohol.
More data is coming out that shows it's not really good for us to drink, but a lot of us do it anyway. So what's going on in the chemistry of our alcoholic bevies? And what are they doing to our brains and bodies? Joining me now are Dr. Tom Shellhammer, a brewer and professor of fermentation science at Oregon State University. He's the past president of the American Society of Brewing Chemists.
And Dr. Jackie Barker, who studies what alcohol does to our brains and our memories at Drexel University's College of Medicine. Welcome to Science Friday to you both. It's great to have you with us. I'm delighted to be here.
Likewise.
Jackie, start us off. How do you think about this tension that we know drinking isn't good for us, but we do it anyway?
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the challenges is being informed. And I think it's really awesome that you're starting this conversation because being able to have the information to make a smart choice about whether you want to enjoy a beer or two beers, or maybe you make that near beer decision, it starts with that information.
And I think there's a growing appreciation that even small amounts of alcohol do impact our brain, do impact behavior. But so do a lot of other things we do, eating lunch meat, sodas, living in a city where you have to rely on cars. And so we're all making choices across our lives about which rewards are valuable enough to us to maybe take some risk alongside them. Jackie, do you drink? I do.
Tom, do you drink? I do. Yeah, for me, it's soft serve ice cream, which in Vermont we call creamies. And I know it's not doing me any good physically, but mentally it is crucial to my mental health.
Oh, yeah. I think we need to do things that make us enjoy ourselves and happy. And alcohol is part of it. I think it's been part of that forever.
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Chapter 2: Why do different types of alcohol affect people differently?
All right. Thank you so much. Bye.
All right. There's a lot in that question. So, you know, how are we to make sense of this when people have had cultures of drinking for, you know, generations in some cases? Jackie, what do you think?
Yeah. So, I mean, I think part of what was mentioned in that call is sort of this idea of consuming alcohol with a meal. I do think that this reflects in part a cultural difference that was hit on a little bit there in the U.S. versus other places where often in other cultures you are having a glass of wine with dinner.
not having as prevalent of a binge-like relationship as is seen often in the US. But to the science, I think that there are very clear emerging data that any alcohol is potentially having negative health consequences. Even a single glass of alcohol can increase risk for various cancers, cardiovascular disease. And again, Being informed of that means you can make the right choice for you.
Is it worth it to increase your risk at whatever level it is? And people can make that decision. But I think some of those early studies, there have been controversy around this idea that people who drink low amounts of alcohol are healthier than abstainers. Some of the data around that seem to suggest that actually there are a variety of confounds.
People who completely abstain from alcohol often have other co-occurring health conditions. And so it may reflect that they have shorter life expectancy, other things that may drive the abstention, not drinking at all. And then that can artificially make it seem like our low drinkers are a healthier population. So it's not causative there. There's a lot baked into the data set.
that I think kind of created that false impression.
We've been hearing a lot recently about the difference in how we metabolize alcohol as we age, and that that can also make a really big change in how you experience drinking and whether and how much you choose to drink. Do you know about that science, Jackie?
So it is definitely the case that alcohol metabolism is altered as a range of metabolic outcomes as we age. Some of this is related to if you have been a chronic drinker across your life, potentially accumulated effects on the liver, which can in fact impact metabolism significantly. It also may be related to sort of a greater medical treatment burden as we age, right?
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