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5 Ways To Detox Alcohol

5 Ways To Detox Alcohol

It is a seductive thought: drinking alcohol is good for you! And, for sure, that is what the $1 trillion dollar alcohol industry would like you to think. Experimental science intrudes rudely into this happy delusion, however.

For many years I did not drink alcohol, after a few unpleasant college hangovers convinced me “there is no way this can be healthy.”

Then I moved to New York City and had dinner with friends. All of a sudden, drinking became an essential part of the social experience: the fine – no – the great! food, the excellent service, the fun conversation, the lights, the festive sounds all over the restaurants we visited. What fun! I was hooked, not on alcohol, but on the social experience in the big city – but I could not deny alcohol was a big, but problematic, part of the experience. I learned that I am, in the parlance of drinking, a “lightweight”, which means my body does not detoxify alcohol quickly.

To understand better, a little chemistry is needed.

Here is the alcohol molecule. It looks like a rascally puppy, likely to knock your favorite vase from its shelf.

alcohol molecule
Image Credit: Geek.com

As soon as we start drinking alcohol, our body begins detoxifying it. Normally, the body can detoxify about 1 unit of alcohol (a half a beer or a half a glass of wine) an hour. The faster we drink, the more our blood alcohol level increases, causing the well-known symptoms of drunkenness, which means we drank alcohol faster than our body could detoxify it.

Alcohol Detoxification
Image Credit: Dr. Houston Anderson

As you can see in the above image, quite a few nutrients are involved in alcohol detoxification, including vitamins B1 (Thiamine), B2 (Riboflavin),B3(Niacin), Zinc, Vitamin C, Magnesium, and Molybdenum, most of which you will find in a multivitamin, so a high-quality multivitamin is a great start in helping your body to detox alcohol.

The Five Main Culprits Causing Hangovers

There has been reasearch specifically on hangovers and the alcohol detoxification process. Here are the five main reasons we get hangovers, with the main causes first:

    1. Congeners

      These chemicals are byproducts of the fermentation process that creates alcohol. Alcohol varies widely in the amount of congeners, with brandy having some of the highest content and vodka and gin some of the lowest. To minimize hangovers you should drink alcholos with less congeners.

Who Invited The Congeners?

Congeners are byproducts of the fermentation process that give different types of alcohol its distinct taste and aroma. But the downside is that congeners are thought to cause many of the hangover symptoms of alcohol.

And let’s not forget alcohol’s most impressive effect: despite the fact that a group of people may hate each other’s guts, and in our political environment that happens quite often, you can still have a grand old time if alcohol is on the table.

It is a seductive thought: drinking alcohol is good for you! And, for sure, that is what the $1 trillion dollar alcohol industry would like you to think. Experimental science intrudes rudely into this happy delusion, however.

For many years I did not drink alcohol, after a few unpleasant college hangovers convinced me “there is no way this can be healthy.”

Then I moved to New York City and had dinner with friends. All of a sudden, drinking became an essential part of the social experience: the fine – no – the great! food, the excellent service, the fun conversation, the lights, the festive sounds all over the restaurants we visited. What fun! I was hooked, not on alcohol, but on the social experience in the big city – but I could not deny alcohol was a big, but problematic, part of the experience. I learned that I am, in the parlance of drinking, a “lightweight”, which means my body does not detoxify alcohol quickly.

To understand better, a little chemistry is needed.

Here is the alcohol molecule. It looks like a rascally puppy, likely to knock your favorite vase from its shelf.

alcohol molecule
Image Credit: Geek.com

As soon as we start drinking alcohol, our body begins detoxifying it. Normally, the body can detoxify about 1 unit of alcohol (a half a beer or a half a glass of wine) an hour. The faster we drink, the more our blood alcohol level increases, causing the well-known symptoms of drunkenness, which means we drank alcohol faster than our body could detoxify it.

Alcohol Detoxification
Image Credit: Dr. Houston Anderson

As you can see in the above image, quite a few nutrients are involved in alcohol detoxification, including vitamins B1 (Thiamine), B2 (Riboflavin), B3(Niacin), Zinc, Vitamin C, Magnesium, and Molybdenum, most of which you will find in a multivitamin, so a high-quality multivitamin is a great start in helping your body to detox alcohol.

The Five Main Culprits Causing Hangovers

There has been research specifically on hangovers and the alcohol detoxification process. Here are the five main reasons we get hangovers, with the main causes first:

    1. Congeners

      These chemicals are byproducts of the fermentation process that creates alcohol. Alcohol varies widely in the amount of congeners, with brandy having some of the highest content and vodka and gin some of the lowest. To minimize hangovers you should drink alcholos with less congeners.

Who Invited The Congeners?

Congeners are byproducts of the fermentation process that give different types of alcohol its distinct taste and aroma. But the downside is that congeners are thought to cause many of the hangover symptoms of alcohol.

And let’s not forget alcohol’s most impressive effect: despite the fact that a group of people may hate each other’s guts, and in our political environment that happens quite often, you can still have a grand old time if alcohol is on the table.

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