Weekend drinking releases more than alcohol into your bloodstream

If you’re out with your friends on a Saturday night and partying hard, there’s a common temptation you must avoid if you want to protect your health. Otherwise a toxic barrage can quickly infect your blood.

Weekend events often involve voluminous amounts of food and alcohol. But a study at the University of Massachusetts Medical School shows that a single night’s overindulgence in alcohol can produce dire effects on your digestive system, your immune system and your health.

The alcohol doesn’t merely make you woozy and unable to drive home. It compromises the walls of your intestines so that bacteria can enter your bloodstream from your gut. That results in higher levels of bacterial toxins circulating in your blood. The toxins, known as endotoxins, can stimulate the body to manufacture immune cells designed to give you a fever, boost inflammation and damage your tissues.

“We found that a single alcohol binge can elicit an immune response, potentially impacting the health of an otherwise healthy individual,” says researcher Gyongyi Szabo, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of medicine. “Our observations suggest that an alcohol binge is more dangerous than previously thought.”

Binge drinking is generally defined as a man downing five or more drinks in a space of two hours or a woman having four or more drinks in that period of time.

The Massachusetts research team performed blood tests on about two dozen men and women who drank enough alcohol to become inebriated. They found that the binge drinking caused a rapid boost in the blood’s endotoxin levels.

Endotoxins consist of toxins that form a section of bacterial cell walls. They are released in the blood when the bacterial cells are destroyed.

The researchers also found that people in the study had bacterial DNA in their bloodstreams. That came about because harmful bacteria had traveled through their intestinal walls.

Does that mean you can’t enjoy a drink with friends this weekend? Not exactly. Drinking wisely means avoiding drinking enough to fall into the binge definition (above). The safest bet, as the saying goes, is just one and be done.

Carl Lowe

By Carl Lowe

has written about health, fitness and nutrition for a wide range of publications including Prevention Magazine, Self Magazine and Time-Life Books. The author of more than a dozen books, he has been gluten-free since 2007.

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