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How Alcohol Affects Your Gut
20 Plays3 months ago
Ready to resolve your constipation, gas, bloating, and other digestive problems for good? Watch my free Gut Recovery Masterclass to learn more about how I help women in your situation: https://gutrecoverymethod.com/register
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Hosted by functional health practitioner and longevity author, Christian Yordanov, this podcast is dedicated to helping women struggling with gastrointestinal problems such as gas, bloating, constipation, and other digestive distress.
Whether you have a diagnosis such as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), IBD (inflammatory bowel disease; Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis), SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth), GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) or not, you will benefit from the insights we'll share.
Join us as we explore the intricate connections between gut health and overall well-being, addressing common issues like fatigue, poor sleep, hormonal imbalances, and anxiety.
Learn how stress impacts your digestive system and discover effective strategies to reduce inflammation, improve digestion, and enhance your quality of life.
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Transcript
Impact of Alcohol on Gut Health
00:00:43
chrisyzen
Hey, it's Christian Jourdanoff. Today we're going to talk about how alcohol affects your gut and its function. So it's,
00:00:54
chrisyzen
everybody knows it's poison alcohol, right? So we have to detoxify that poison in the liver, right? As a byproduct of that,
00:01:07
chrisyzen
the So when alcohol is broken down to be detoxified, there's byproducts of that that are potentially um dangerous, potentially ah damaging to our liver cells and stuff like that. So things like acetaldehyde and that's what acetaldehyde is what actually contributes to the hungover feeling, right? So because it's poisoning us, right? So everybody knows that, but what about its effects on the gut? If you have a gut issue,
Ethanol and Intestinal Permeability
00:01:37
chrisyzen
should you curtail or maybe completely avoid alcohol until such a time where your gut is functioning smoothly and optimally again.
00:01:49
chrisyzen
And when we examine some of the mechanisms on alcohol on the gut, it seems like that that is actually a very prudent decision. So I'm going to discuss a couple of them here. And the first one is that alcohol itself, the ethanol, can damage the cells of the of the intestinal barrier directly.
Consequences of Leaky Gut
00:02:11
chrisyzen
And that can lead to the well-known state known, now well ah with the now now well-known state known as intestinal permeability or increased leaky gut. That's when the gaps between your intestinal cells increase. So the little proteins that hold the intestinal cells together They get damaged or for whatever reason they loosen and that kind of that that allows harmful potentially harmful substances to slip in between the gut cells and then into systemic circulation. So some of these can be
00:02:51
chrisyzen
Bacterial metabolites that the immune system reacts to on favorably with a lot of inflammation. It could be undigested parts of bits of food. um It could be ah chemical toxins in the food toxic metals and stuff like that and that systemic inflammation.
Nutritional Deficiencies from Inflammation
00:03:08
chrisyzen
when it's occurring on a long-term basis has been implicated in a lot of diseases and conditions, right? But the intestinal permeability aspect, the leaky gut aspect, that can also lead to localized inflammation and damage to the gut lining itself and that then subsequently can prevent the a full breakdown of the food that that we're eating and then it's absorption right so that can impair digestion and absorption thus a simulation of food and over time of course that can lead to nutritional deficiencies and a lot of us out there
Stress, Alcohol, and Gut Recovery
00:03:51
chrisyzen
are living with chronic subclinical deficiencies in various minerals, B vitamins, fat soluble vitamins, and hence why a lot of people are not feeling too amazing nowadays, especially when once you reach the age of 40, 45, 50 plus, a lot of people start to really creak and start breaking down. And alcohol does not help the situation.
00:04:16
chrisyzen
it's more alcohol is kind of it's our imperfect way of self-medicating and usually we're medicating ourselves against stress that we just don't have better ways to to process and to kind of alleviate right and with my gut recovery method that's why a massive piece of the program is stress reduction right because unless you reduce stress, a ah just healing is really impeded. You cannot heal as quickly as you normally would if if you if you're able to reduce the stress hormones in your body.
Reducing Stress for Healing
00:04:56
chrisyzen
because from that when you're more stressed you can't sleep as well in your stress hormones are elevated they impair heating processes they actually halt them they stop those heating processes because cortisol it it stops protein synthesis in cells and actually signals the cells to start breaking down so it's kind of the opposite of healing it's degeneration that's so that's what stress drives as we've covered before so part of the program is to reduce physically these stress hormones in your body, right? We're not trying to like meditate the stress away. We're actually biochemically putting those levers, levers, whatever the pronunciation is, where depending on where you are in the world.
00:05:41
chrisyzen
So we're pulling very powerful levers and that has can have a profound effect on some people. The more stressed the a client is, the more profound that effect is, right and
Client Success Stories with Stress Reduction
00:05:52
chrisyzen
at least initially. right the first The first period when you kind of really lower your stress biochemically,
00:05:58
chrisyzen
Can be almost surreal and I've had clients tell me that it's like ah doesn't this doesn't feel right. I feel like ah Like a child like I did when I was a kid when I had no no cares and worries in the world That's because that person was so severely stressed and it it was so normal for them to be like that for like years and years possibly even decades as part of their adult life their responsibilities their job their family stuff and So then when we reduce the stress hormones they're like wow.
Alcohol, GABA, and Natural Alternatives
00:06:29
chrisyzen
so and this is where clients tell me that they they stop feeling the urge or the desire to even have drinks and some clients tell me they don't actually get the same buzz from drinks or even from like if if they partake in some uh the odd spliff here there at your joint say they don't feel that same sort of buzz or euphoria from those couple of um ah things and that's because What they do, what the alcohol does is part of its effects, it has a lot of different effects in the body. Part of its effects is it modulates the inhibitory um nervous system.
00:07:08
chrisyzen
So the ga it's called kind of the GABAergic nervous system. That's the one where when you tap into that, you or when you activate those receptors, you you feel calmer, you feel that a bit more, um your anxiety subsides. So a lot of drugs like benzodiazepines, they modulate that nervous system. A lot of herbs actually have an effect on that GABA receptor, get the GABA A receptor, things like chamomile, ashwagandam, lemon balm. There's quite a lot of different ones that have been found to have an effect. That's why they have a calming effect. right But so alcohol, benzos and herbs have that effect. But
00:07:55
chrisyzen
the way we do it with my clients is we use even more natural molecules that the body recognizes to do that and that that basically reduces the chance of side effects addiction, ah withdrawal, or um things like, ah um what's the what's the word
Benefits of Natural Stress Reducers
00:08:20
chrisyzen
I'm looking for? When you get used to the same dose and then you need a bigger dose to get to that get that effect, like with alcohol, or like with drugs, like certain pharmaceuticals and stuff like that. So all of those things, or tolerance, yeah, so you don't build a tolerance
00:08:34
chrisyzen
you don't get addicted there's no withdrawal and there's rarely side effects because there might be initial side effects where you feel almost uneasy feeling so relaxed some people do get anxious because they're they're getting relaxed ah so somewhat paradoxically um and then sometimes sometimes you when estrogen is involved and estrogen is inside the tissues, if we can antagonize it, get it out of there whilst it's traveling through the blood, going to the liver and getting detoxified, it can cause a short period, a few days up to a week of somewhat kind of estrogen dominance type symptoms that will subside, right? But we always we're always doing other things like supporting detoxification so estrogen doesn't build up and doesn't cause these issues. So there's a lot of
00:09:28
chrisyzen
different modalities but that we're kind of working towards.
Holistic Stress Reduction Benefits
00:09:34
chrisyzen
There's a lot of different aspects that that the program covers, right? But the stress reduction piece, if you can dial that in, sleep improves, your mood and outlook improve, your recovery and you improves, you accelerate your heating the healing processes in your body. And you you just start to even look younger and you feel better and you have more energy, right? Just by reducing the stress hormones.
00:09:58
chrisyzen
Very, very freaking amazing.
Alcohol's Impact on Gut Microbiota
00:10:01
chrisyzen
um Okay. So impact on the gut lining intestinal permeability, that's one effect alcohol has. The other one is it can alter the gut microbiota. So it can actually, apparently it can promote the growth of certain harmful um Bacteria while reducing the but the the beneficial one. So they write about that in ah the journal of Frontiers in Physiology and in Nature Reviews Gastroenterology and Hepatology, right?
00:10:33
chrisyzen
Then alcohol stimulates the production of pro-inflammatory molecules that can contribute to inflamm inflammation. right This inflammation can damage the intestinal lining, but as we've already covered. And this actually this chronic inflammation in the gut, not systemically, but in the gut, that's actually been linked to various gastrointestinal-specific disorders like gastritis, pancreatitis, and then there's an increase for gastrointestinal cancers.
Alcohol, Nutrient Absorption, and Detox
00:11:03
chrisyzen
It can also exacerbate existing conditions like ah inflammatory bowel disease, so ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, and stuff like that, right? Then the impact of nutrient absorption, I also kind of covered that a little bit. So basically alcohol, the so the damage to the intestinal lining, that in in and of itself can reduce nutrient absorption, but also the fact that alcohol can interfere with the absorption ah the absorption of essential nutrients, right?
00:11:33
chrisyzen
um Then the fact that it requires nutrients and energy to detoxify alcohol, so things like zinc, B vitamins, so we actually deplete those which could be used in the immune system for healing, regeneration, repair,
00:11:50
chrisyzen
Myriad bodily functions could use who put those nutrients and that energy to better use. um So yeah, so B1, that's one that that that gets depleted, vitamin B1, folate, vitamin B12.
00:12:07
chrisyzen
ah Then there's an effect on gut motility. So the flow of the food, the chime down the small intestine and then you know the as the
Alcohol's Effect on Digestion and Motility
00:12:19
chrisyzen
stool gets formed. So for some people,
00:12:22
chrisyzen
it can aggravate their IBS right because alcohol affects the enteric nervous system. right So that's the nervous system that that controls the muscular contraction contractions of the intestines, right the peristalsis as it's also known.
00:12:37
chrisyzen
so that effect for some it can constipate them others it it can cause like this watery diarrhea it really depends but in any case if you already have ah an existing gut issue this is not something this is not like a ah wild card you want to throw into the mix because you just Some days you might not have ah you know a negative you don't feel a negative effect in this sense, other days it might ah
Chronic Alcohol Use and Health Risks
00:13:03
chrisyzen
flare you up. So it's just one of those things where if you have the option to remove a potential stressor or harmful factor, you're probably better off doing that, right?
00:13:14
chrisyzen
And then I already kind of covered this, but alcohol consumption, this is when it's more chronic, right? ah That can also contribute to alcoholic liver disease, pancreatitis and gastritis. And in terms of liver disease, something like at least a quarter of US adults have non-alcoholic liver disease right so people's livers are already so congested and um basically dysfunctional that has to do with the the very high seed oil consumption in the West it also has to do with
00:13:53
chrisyzen
um a lot of the the liver is really it's working in overtime nowadays a human liver living in the industrialized world is working overtime so constantly 24 seven to detoxify the constant exposures we're getting from the plastics you're touching your computer your car the polybrominated dipheno ethers, that's like the the flame retardants in your car seat, in your couch, in your bed, it's insane. And that's just the plastics, we've got the toxic metals, the air pollution that we're constantly breathing in, right? So we are constantly detoxifying things and pushing them out
00:14:38
chrisyzen
the liver cells are pushing them into the bile that's going, so that's supposed to be going down our bile ducts into the small intestine, then into the large intestine as part of the poop, we're supposed to poop it out. But because we recycle this bile like multiple times a day, a lot of it gets recycled, a lot of toxins recirculate and they go back through this thing ah ah known as enteral hepatic circulation. So from the gut enteral,
00:15:05
chrisyzen
hepatic liver so from the gut to the liver there's the circulation where we kind of reabsorb things that the body wants to recycle and because it doesn't want to waste things that it created so that's those toxins recirculating back can actually damage the liver and So a lot of people's livers are already dysfunctional, ah ah given the fact that, like I said, 25-30% of US adults who have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So adding a further burden on the liver, especially when you have an existing condition like a gut problem in this case, is definitely something to be avoided if you can.
00:15:44
chrisyzen
And um I mean, we we're not talking about having a glass of wine once a week, of course, right?
Alternatives to Alcohol for Relaxation
00:15:51
chrisyzen
We're talking about, you know, a glass of of wine once, twice, ah one to glass of wine a day. At that point, I would say it would start having an impact on your healing processes and and your healing journey. So at that point, I would probably consider other ways to to basically to relax or kind of you know just to get that relaxing effect from from the alcohol whether that's like a herb or a supplement or meditation or breath work or um EFT tapping um ah there's quite a few different other things you know and going for a walk or reading something novel something reading a new book so just something
00:16:39
chrisyzen
ah stimulating or or relaxing depending on what you're looking for um and just reducing something that will help you reduce your stress really that's kind of at the end of the day what a lot of people ah gravitate towards alcohol for and the social aspect of course but you know in a social setting it's it's of course you can always just have one and then after that just switch to like drinking I don't know tonic water or something like that if as long as it doesn't have high fructose corn syrup so that's my thoughts kind of on ah some of the mechanisms of alcohol and the gut and probably just to kind of summarize probably something to avoid whilst you are on your healing journey back to optimal health and digestion
00:17:27
chrisyzen
Once you're there, ah the healthier we are, the more the more damage we can take. right So once you're there, it's it's ah it's of course up to you. But I find a lot of people, once they kind of sort out their hormones, and their biochemistry, their neurotransmitter stuff, ah they they don't they don't feel like they need
Concluding Thoughts on Avoiding Alcohol
00:17:49
chrisyzen
it anymore. And they they naturally just they refuse it or they don't even consider it as something they want to do. so Hope you found this informative and thanks for tuning in and I'll see you on the next episode.