Sometimes abstentionism can cause death. Find out what those situations are for you to identify.
The dinner came to an end and the party had begun. My host pulled a dark bottle filled with an elixir from the cupboard, which was completely legal, available, without prescriptions, and – most researchers agree – could provide me with a longer and healthier life. By the way, it also goes well with raw meat (tartar) and fine cheese.
My friend served and offered the wine. Studies say: Take it has been said! and if I do it, I will be able to work more, because I will be less likely to suffer a heart attack (and more survival forecasts if I have one), also decrease my chances of developing senile dementia and perhaps also avoid the dreaded common cold. I looked at the cup. Good red wine “No, thanks,” I said.
I have never had a beer or a drink. Or a glass of wine. I took “high octane” cough syrup when I was little. (My mom kept a jar of something that tasted like crushed pine thorns.) And once in my youth, after taking the last spoonful of chocolate syrup from an ice cream, at the reception of a wedding, I was surprised by the bitter taste that remained. For a moment, I sat with my head on my side, watching me curiously because I realized, with the sensation I had in my throat, that I had just ingested some rum. So maybe I can’t claim that I am a complete abstemious, but those few tablespoons I took are the sum of my position as a social drinker that I have adopted all my life.
When someone offers me a drink on occasion and I refuse it, people invariably react in one of these two ways: he looks surprised and says: “sorry, I didn’t know,” or “ok, don’t worry,” and he they are thinking that they will receive from me an explanation of why I do not take. But, commonly, people pause and then – they act as if they had understood me – and exclaim: “ah!”, They withdraw their cup from my sight and make a gesture of recognition of my effort to keep me sober believing that I am an alcoholic .
The truth is that I don’t drink. But lately I’ve been wondering: should I start doing it? And when I pass a glass of Merlot I think, do I somehow refuse to have a longer life?
“Abstinence,” says Dr. David J. Hanson, “is a risk factor for health and longevity.” Hanson, Professor of Sociology, who during his career has researched alcohol and how to drink it, refers to a Danish study in which 12,000 people were followed for 20 years. Those who drank moderately and exercised reduced the chance of dying from heart disease by 50%; who exercised and were 30% abstemious. Who would say that I could have optimized my exercise routine with a beer jar?
The concept of “healthy happy hour” was launched in 1904 when the Journal of the American Medical Association circulated an article in which it suggested that alcohol consumption could prevent heart disease. More than a century later, researchers are still not convinced, their doubts interest me to know the risks of my health.
I suffer slightly from Raynaud’s disease, which causes intermittent interruptions in the blood circulation of my fingers; A study published in the American Journal of Medicine suggests that I may be able to reduce the incidence of Raynaud’s symptoms if I drink two glasses of red wine a week. My LDL (low density lipoprotein) cholesterol regularly marks in the red zone; In 2009, a group of researchers from the University of Connecticut, in the United States, confirmed that resveratrol (a natural antioxidant present in grapes and products derived from them such as red wine) lowers the production of LDL cholesterol, also helps to increase levels to clean the arteries of HDL cholesterol (high density lipoproteins). And I still strive to pass the fat from my smoked sausages with cola, instead of with an ice cold beer.
I grew up in a church that forbade the use of alcohol. We drank grape juice for communion. But this barely explains my long life of abstinence, because at the first opportunity many young devotees become drinkers of the forbidden fermented fruit. Even my sweet, chaste and believing teenager was punished for sneaking beer. I never understood what it was to drink. I understood lust and greed, and even gluttony, but I never understood why anyone would want to hide behind the high school gymnasium to take a cooler until they vomit it over the skirt of one of the cheerleaders. I had not taken the right position (in fact, I had fun in the alley of the mobile homes away from all people) I simply had no desire to take.Now I am over 40 years old and, for the first time, I feel professional pressure, not from my drunken teenage friends, but from respected researchers whose medical studies suggest that it can be silly to deprive yourself of a drink.
Even so, when you have survived four decades without one, you think twice before drinking. I have doubted it because my family has bad luck, suffers from a certain type of depression and obsessive-compulsive traits (some of us are medicated). I also know that when depression and hard workload combine, I can get depressed for weeks, just eating cakes, drinking coffee and taking naps all the time.
In my thirties, I fell into deep depressions and hid for months in my house. Self-pity and the breakdown of a relationship with a woman, long ago, were part of this, but my internal chemistry was also bad. I wasn’t suicidal, but I had reached the point where I practically didn’t care if I was hit by a trailer. One day, silently desperate to give my head a vacation, I had a moment of reflection in which I said, “Aha!”: So this is why people drink. Then, I went to my office and watched the hovel turned into a muladar in which I lived – stacks of unfinished work, dozens of emails not answered, unpaid receipts, the answering machine blinking, 20 empty coffee cups (some of them with mold) and cellophane wraps thrown everywhere. I had another thought: Hey, maybe drinking alcohol might not be the best for me … It could be fatal.
A short time later, I accompanied my friend Albert – a connoisseur of small bars, cigars and cold beer – to a tavern. As I told him about my problems and turned them around with my glass of water, Al listened to me patiently. I confess that I was finally tempted to start drinking.
“Oh, Mikey …” he said, in the cutest of tones. “There will never be a better time to start drinking!” He said that while he raised his beer and wore it in the palm of his other hand, as a game, he showed it to the host as if he presumed a prize and said: “Happiness in a can, my friend … Happiness in a can ” Bad advice, I was not yet ready to enter the cellar. Much less for happiness than according to a can. But what about health in a can?
Professor Leo Sioris, a doctor of pharmaceuticals, offers a lecture at the University of Minnesota, United States, called Wine, alcohol and health. When I saw the subtitle of the conference I made a phone call and asked: “Hey doctor, should I start drinking?” “It seems easy,” said Dr. Sioris, a clinical toxicologist who accumulates red wine in a full cellar. “I drink or not?” And then he replied: “In fact, that depends on your health, and any medication or supplement you take has a potential for addiction. This really must be decided between your GP and you. ” More cryptic?
I am hopeful of receiving definitive answers, so I was encouraged when I read that Dr. Sioris adds in the study that during 2002 the Academy of Sciences of New York published a series of algorithms planned to arrive at conjecture about the therapeutic of the drink. According to these practical guidelines, a guy like me (non-drinker, over 40 years old, with a total cholesterol that exceeds 200) may feel free to drink one to three drinks of wine a week.
But after all, deep down, in the small letters where it says, “exclusions,” I see this: “no drinkers with a personal history of alcohol problems.” After never having drunk, how do I know if I have problems with the cup or not? I thought about how I make it so that coffee and sugar produce the same pleasure that it seems to generate for everyone, and I wondered: what if I am one of those who has a single drink, I love it and I can never stop?
My habit of consuming sugar, in fact, can be an alarm signal. The portion of our brain that feels rewarded by alcohol also determines our reaction to sweets and, according to a study by the Monte Sinai School of Medicine, my desire to eat sugar in any way makes me more likely to become An alcoholic than someone who can get away from sweet cookies.
What I found out later is that a team from the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center recently discovered the sequence of a chromosome that was significantly associated with alcoholism. So I contacted the director, Dr. Raymond White, to see if I could present a tissue sample and establish the chances I have of ending up being a drunk.
“It would be at least a decade before we could sufficiently complete our knowledge to give you a reasonable indication and, even then, it would be uncertain,” says White. “In this area of genetic risk assessment, we are very far from cardiovascular studies and cancer research.”
Even if my genes may or may not indicate my liking for liquor, Dr. Ezra Amsterdam would not have recommended that I start drinking. “There are other ways to have a healthy heart,” says the specialist, associate head of cardiology at the University of Carolina, in the United States. In the Davis medical center. He recently published a summary of the research on health and alcohol, in which he considers that the advantages of drinking can be easily exaggerated – first, especially if you had taken it . “There are some possible benefits for low consumption, but there are also real inconveniences,” says Amsterdam. “In the general population, once men have two drinks a day, the risk increases practically for each disease.”
I faced the advice that conflicted with experts about alcohol and, finally, I listened to my wife. She is a moderate drinker and a fan of nutrition. Then I asked him: “Do you think I should start drinking?”; He replied: “Not if you are going to manage your way of drinking as you do with the consumption of sugar.” Recently, she has been forced to hide the desserts she bakes (specifically, chocolate chip bags) in the freezer, under a pile of pork ribs. I know because it is where I found the delicious sweets on a Tuesday at 3 in the morning. But that’s decided: I’m going to stay in my fight. After all these years it would be a shame to discover that I am that guy who can’t stand without his alcoholic drink.And there would be nothing sadder for a man my age, than going to get drunk at one of those bars where he is going to shout with a drink in his hand while watching a soccer game on television.In addition, the life of the abstemious has its good things. The first time I was called to be a juror to determine a legal process, it was for a guy who was fighting a case in which someone had driven drunk. Having responded as an Emergency Medicine Technician (EMT) to alcohol-related accidents for years and having worked at least one accident scene with an expert in the field, I imagined that he would be rejected immediately , that would not include me. But I entered the last group and they chose me. Just when the judge turned his chair to begin the trial, he paused and turned back to see who we were in the jury’s gallery. “Just out of curiosity,” he said, “is there anyone here who doesn’t drink?”
I raised my hand. I was the only one.
“Do you think that if someone drinks alcohol is a bad person?” Asked the judge.
“If I thought about it,” I replied, “I wouldn’t have a single friend.”
That caused quite a laugh.
And then he excluded me.