WHICH IS HEALTHIER: DRINKING A LITTLE EVERY DAY OR ONLY AT WEEKENDS?
By greatist.com - Alexandra Duron
If there’s one thing that tends to blur the
line between friend and foe, it’s alcohol. One glass of wine can easily morph
into two. Then add shots to the mix, and your casual night out gets sloppy
fast. So we had to wonder: Is it better to stay sober during the week and get
crazy on the weekend or pour yourself one drink on the daily?
Why
It Hurts to Go Hard
We hate to be killjoys, but just because
you didn’t partake during the work week doesn’t mean you’ve got a free pass to
rage your face off on Friday. In fact, there’s a lengthy list of how heavy
drinking—even if it’s confined to a single night—can wreck your health.
For starters, binge drinking (i.e. pounding
four drinks if you’re a girl and five if you’re a guy in under two hours)
boosts your risk for liver disease, which in turn damages other organs in the
body, such as your heart, kidney, and brain. And you may be hitting that
threshold more often than you realize. One standard drink technically equals 12
ounces of regular beer, five ounces of wine, and 1.5 ounces of hard (80-proof)
liquor—meaning a couple of hefty pours at happy hour can add up fast.
Worst-case scenario: Since alcohol acts as
a depressant, drinking a substantial amount in a relatively short time period
can lead to alcohol poisoning/overdose, coma, or death, explains Dessa
Bergen-Cico, Ph.D., an associate professor of Public Health and Addiction
Studies at Syracuse University. When a person consumes more alcohol than their
body can metabolize at one time, the concentration of alcohol builds up in the
bloodstream, suppressing vital functions like breathing and heart rate.
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