ZOE Science & Nutrition
How to drink alcohol without destroying your health | Prof. David Nutt
08 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
Chapter 2: Why have humans been drinking alcohol for 40,000 years?
The sound of a cork popping at a New Year's Eve party. The invigorating buzz of a busy bar on a Friday evening. Alcohol is embedded deeply in our collective consciousness. Whether it's unwinding after a stressful day, celebrating a promotion, or drowning our sorrows, alcohol is usually our drug of choice.
But would you still want that drink if you knew that apart from tobacco, alcohol kills more people than all other drugs combined? Today, I'm joined by David Nutt, a psychiatrist and professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. He's the world's leading expert on alcohol, having published over 500 original research papers, eight government reports, and 40 books.
His passionate, outspoken dedication to sensible science-backed drug policy has landed him in hot water, but the evidence is on his side. In this episode, he explains why alcohol is so harmful, why it's still so popular, and how you can start cutting down today.
Chapter 3: What happens to your body when you drink alcohol?
By the end of this episode, you'll have the cold, hard facts about alcohol and some simple tips to help guide you on how you could reduce your intake and indeed if you should.
Chapter 4: How does alcohol compare to other harmful drugs?
David, thank you for joining me today. Nice to be here. It's a real pleasure. We always start these shows with a rapid fire Q&A with questions from our listeners. And we have some very strict rules. You can say yes or no, or if you have to, a one sentence answer. Yes.
Chapter 5: What is the truth behind the red wine health myth?
You've got it already.
Chapter 6: What are the health risks associated with even moderate drinking?
All right. Is alcohol more harmful than the drug ecstasy? Yes. Can reducing alcohol intake improve your sleep? Yes. Should the government ban alcohol? No. If I'm only drinking a glass or two of alcohol a night, could it still be affecting my mental health? Depends on the size of the glass. So, yes. Do I need to cut out alcohol completely in order to improve my health? No.
And finally, what's the biggest misconception that people have about alcohol? That middle-aged men benefit from drinking red wine. Alcohol is sort of so pervasive in the world. I've never really thought about the fact that at some point in the past, our ancestors must have discovered how to make it. And if I'd guessed, I would have assumed this was like two or three thousand years ago.
But I understand you told our research team that our ancestors have actually had a love affair with alcohol for a really long time. Well, we don't know when humans first started manufacturing alcohol, but they almost certainly met alcohol through rotting fruit.
And they would have been fascinated by why other animals were foraging around trees, fruit trees, plum trees, et cetera, where the stuff had fallen on the ground and fermented. They would have eaten that and they would have found it was psychoactive.
Chapter 7: How can cutting down alcohol improve your health?
The first recorded evidence of producing alcohol is mead produced from fermenting honey. Possibly 40,000 years ago. 40,000 years ago? Yes. It was suggested in the African Rift Valley that the very early hominids actually worked out that you could ferment honey to get a better intoxicant.
And then in terms of sort of the modern human era, we've got evidence of people brewing in China 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. So it sounds like basically our ancestors learned how to make fire, make a sharp stick, and then proceeded to basically figure out how to make beer. Yes.
So there's an interesting tension in the field of sort of paleoanthropology between a man called Johann Hariri, who wrote the book Sapiens. And he postulates that human civilization developed because people discovered how to turn wheat into bread. and therefore they had to plant wheat seeds and then wait for the seeds to grow and make sure that their goats didn't eat them.
So while they were sitting around waiting for the wheat to grow, they discovered things like mathematics and language and all sorts of cultural developments. But there's another guy called Edward Slingerland who said, ah, no, no, no, wheat was the original crop, but they were growing wheat to make beer. Ha, ha, ha, ha. We're sitting in England today.
And so I guess I think about really ancient monuments in England and Stonehenge. And I understand you have some views about this as well. Well, Slingerland believes it's these great monolithic temples which scatter around most of the world, in fact.
were not necessarily to do with astronomy or astrology, but they were sort of gathering places where the small human tribes, who were obviously quite disparate and had rather a limited genetic variation, would come together when alcohol was available, that would be in the autumn, to have massive parties in which people would meet others.
And therefore, you could spread the gene pool because you would actually have some sort of sex out with your tribe. And that was great for genetic variation. Wow. So this was like the original raves. Correct. But possibly on a slightly larger scale than we do today and probably a bit less violent.
You're painting a picture of alcohol as something that we have coexisted with really for sort of as long as there's been human society. So, you know, you're making some jokes, but it's really interesting that you're suggesting this is deeply intermingled with what it is to be human. Yes. And I think the reason for that is that humans are a very successful species.
Obviously, we're the dominant species in the planet. And that's because we work together in groups and we pool intellect and strength, etc. But we're actually not very good at socializing. Most of us are slightly anxious in social situations. And it kind of makes sense when you're meeting a stranger. You need to know whether they're on the side or not.
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Chapter 8: What practical advice can help reduce alcohol consumption?
So there's the toxicity of alcohol. Then there's the fact that alcohol itself is broken down into a metabolite called acetaldehyde. And acetaldehyde is one carbon atom longer than formaldehyde. And most people know formaldehyde is a preservative. Dead bodies are put into formaldehyde to stop them dissolving. And acetaldehyde is also a pickling agent.
So acetaldehyde contributes to the pickling of your body, in particular your liver, and and your brain, not a good thing. The area that perhaps people haven't understood as much as they should is that you begin to damage the surface of blood vessels. So they become stiff and then you get the cholesterol deposits.
So you get the plaques laid down and then the plaques, of course, give you stenosis of the heart. So you get less blood flow to the heart. So you have an angina or heart attacks, but also the same, you get blockages of blood flow to the brain. So alcohol contributes to both heart disease and also to basically stroke.
It's actually quite surprising, I think, what you're describing to understand that the alcohol is doing things that I think many of us think about food doing. So as you're describing blockages in my arteries, in my brain, this has come up a lot on podcasts here at ZOE, but people are talking about red meats and saturated fats and things like that, ultra processed foods.
And it sounds like you're saying that actually alcohol, which isn't any of those things, and I wouldn't have thought would be doing anything to my blood vessels as doing something similar? Yes. So, I mean, a saturated fat is an oxidized fat.
And what alcohol does is produce free radicals, which oxidizes the fat more and oxidizes the surface of cells, oxidizes more of the cholesterol that's being deposited. You know, oxidized proteins are basically dysfunctional proteins. And oxidized fats are less functional fats. So what is the body doing in response to this? Why does that lead to these increased risks you're describing?
Well, because you begin to fur up your arteries. Alcohol has two big effects on the cardiovascular system. The first is it furs it up by encouraging the deposition of cholesterol and the hardening of cholesterol. And secondly, if you then do have a problem, if you have a bleed, you get excessive bleeding because alcohol damages the clotting factors as well.
So you're saying first it furs you up, and then if you do have some sort of bleed inside you, it stops you like clotting that in the way that you want to. Excessive alcohol intake, and we'll maybe talk in a minute about what that means, is probably the easiest, most tractable target for lowering blood pressure.
The advice we give is if you're hypertensive, you should explore cutting down your alcohol intake because that, in many cases, will reduce your blood pressure significantly. And the reason the blood pressure goes up with alcohol is because of this stiffening of the arteries because of these free radicals that alcohol produces and the laying down of cholesterol.
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