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'I had no idea being a social drinker would damage my liver by 31' (www.bbc.co.uk)
20 points by YeGoblynQueenne 1 hour ago | hide | past | web | 18 comments | favorite





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

“I’m a social drinker”


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).

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

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".

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.


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

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

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?

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.


> 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.


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.



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