'I had no idea being a social drinker would damage my liver by 31' | Hacker News Reader

'I had no idea being a social drinker would damage my liver by 31'

bbc.co.uk

I pretty much stopped drinking after getting a Garmin and working out regularly (zwift).

Even a single bottle of beer completely wrecks all of my stats for the next 24 hrs. Sleep quality nosedives, heart rate shoots up and I'm sweating like an idiot on very moderate cycling efforts. No surprise this is bad for your health, 3 evenings a week mean, you'll spend close to half your time in this hungover state.

Sleep disruption is what makes me want to not drink. One already stressful day can become harder to recover from with bad sleep and it all cascades onto the following days.

Why don’t you stop and see if it makes a difference?

Oh I did already a long time ago, I can't afford not to be 100% when I wake up.

It's my understanding that you can mostly avoid alcohol induced sleep disruption by drinking less, pacing your drinking and stopping roughly six hours before you want to go to sleep.

This is the chief reason why I drink way less than I did in my 20s and why I focus way more on quality now. If I'm only having two or three drinks over two or three hours, they'd better be worth it.

> by definition, my alcohol consumption from my late teens to late 20s would be considered binge drinking.

“I’m a social drinker”

The article defines “binge drinking” later on:

> In the UK, a binge is considered as drinking six or more units of alcohol in one sitting for women, and eight or more for men. That is two large glasses of wine for a woman.

That is not a socially outlandish amount of alcohol to consume.

"Binging" is also not socially outlandish. There's a lot of room between "social drinking" and "socially outlandish drinking".

4 pints? That's just "taking the edge off"

Man, which bars do you frequent where a large glass of wine is two pints?

Heh he probably meant alcohol content

It’s a little over half a bottle of 13.5% wine (according to one sample on my counter, the full bottle is 10.1 UK units).

So no, not outlandish.

(And oddly, Irish units are larger than UK units, even though we both use the same pints)

It also says that two large glasses of wine in one sitting is a binge for women.

Are you implying that's semantically surprising? My wife has to take even a single standard glass slowly. All smaller people I know do, unless they are intending to get at least tipsy, which is probably outside most definitions of "social drinking" (but not outside typical drinking behavior among friends, if you want to take the phrase "social drinking" as statistically literal).

How much is sex and how much is body weight and genetics? Swedish and Japanese livers process stuff quite differently, I expect some variation even among "Anglo".

Isn't getting tipsy the driving motivation behind social drinking? If it weren't, people would be drinking grape juice.

It's a cultural thing. Traditionally, in Mediterranean societies, "drinking socially" means you are sitting at a long table with your family having a big meal and drinking wine from a small glass.

Granted, today the families are smaller, the tables are shorter, the meals are faster, the wine glasses are larger, "social drinking" spills out to drinking with friends and colleagues, and getting at least pleasantly sloshed of a night out is increasingly common, as is bingeing and getting totally smashed with your friends. At which point, yeah, the purpose of "social drinking" is getting off your tits.

We are all slowly turning into Western Europeans I guess :/

> After my blood tests came back as abnormal I was sent to Glasgow’s New Victoria Hospital, where I had an ultrasound, and finally a fibroscan. All this took place over the course of about a year. A fibroscan is a type of non-invasive ultrasound which measures liver stiffness. A reading of seven kPA (a unit used to measure the level of oxygen in the blood) or below is considered normal. My reading was 10.2.

> Several months after my diagnosis, I went back for a repeat fibroscan to see if there had been any improvement. I was relieved to see that my fibroscan reading had gone from 10.2 to 4.7 - back in the normal and healthy range.

That's a pretty dramatic recovery. Reassuring for those who are thinking about quitting alcohol.

Social binge-drinking is the norm. Amongst my peers, I’d define this as drinking to the point of severe drunkenness on a roughly biweekly basis.

I think it’s genuinely frightening how normalized this is.

times are changing though…

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/why-is-everyone-sober-ish-all-...

Coming up on 1 year off alcohol next week. My college freshman son was having issues with his alcohol intake so I quit for him, but have noticed I feel much better mainly due to better sleep. I quit using the "alcohol is poison" reframe from Scott Adams.

Alcohol Is poison.

Anything is poison with the right dosage.

Alcohol is in the poison zone for almost any regularly consumed dose. That's not true for the things you're eluding to like oxygen and water. You have to go out of your way and force yourself to drink a poisonous amount of water. Casual alcohol consumption is a poisonous dose.

s/eluding/alluding/

("Eluding" means escaping, "alluding" means referencing)

This is correct.

No amount of alcohol is a “safe dose” physically, and it’s an emotional retardant for anyone interested in growth and development.

Great to see it becoming more recognized as an obsolete consumable within the human species.

he he. Fun poison

I love the downvotes for speaking the truth.

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