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The Famous Grouse Alcohol and diabetes
Drinking alcohol can contribute to the conditions that cause diabetes
There are three main ways drinking alcohol to excess can be a factor in causing diabetes:
1.Heavy drinking can reduce the body’s sensitivity to insulin, which can trigger type 2 diabetes (7).
2.Diabetes is a common side effect of chronic pancreatitis, which is overwhelmingly caused by heavy drinking.
3.Alcohol contains a huge amount of calories – one pint of lager can be equivalent to a slice of pizza. So drinking can also increase your chance of becoming overweight and your risk of developing type 2 diabetes (8).
Alcohol and sugar
How much sugar is in alcohol and how does it affect the body?
The fact that alcoholic drinks are full of empty calories and have no nutritional value is bad news for your waistline, but what many people don’t consider is that they’re also full of sugar.
A pint of cider can contain as many as five teaspoons of sugar – almost as much as the World Health Organisation recommends that you do not exceed per day! (1) What’s more, alcohol can negatively alter blood sugar levels, putting heavy drinkers at increased risk of diabetes.
How sugar affects your body
Too much sugar is bad for your heath in a number of ways. Firstly, it’s very high in calories, and excessive consumption can lead to unhealthy weight gain. Being overweight can make you more susceptible to long term health problems, including life threatening illnesses such as heart disease. A high-sugar diet can also lead to type 2 diabetes, which occurs when a person’s blood sugar levels are too high.
Quite apart from the damage it can do to your body, sugar is also the main cause of tooth decay, which can lead to cavities if left untreated.
Sugar in alcohol
According to the NHS, alcoholic drinks account for 11% of the UK population’s daily intake of added sugar. Despite this, many people forget to factor in what they drink when calculating daily sugar intake. All alcoholic beverages contain some sugar, but Dr Sarah Jarvis, a member of Drinkaware’s medical panel, identifies fortified wines, sherries, liqueurs and cider as being particular causes of excessive consumption. It’s also important to consider what you’re mixing your drinks with, as the carbonated drinks popular with spirits are often very high in sugar.
Alcohol and blood sugar
However, it’s not only the high sugar content of alcohol that can affect your body – drinking to excess has also been shown to have a negative effective on blood sugar.
When a person drinks alcohol, the body reacts to it as a toxin, and channels all energy into expelling it. This means that other processes are interrupted – including the production of glucose and the hormones needed to regulate it. This is most noticeable in heavy drinkers, as over time drinking too much alcohol decreases the effectiveness of insulin, which leads to high blood sugar levels.
Alcohol also affects blood sugar levels each time it’s consumed, which means occasional drinkers can also be negatively impacted. Alcohol consumption causes an increase in insulin secretion, which leads to low blood sugar (otherwise known as hypoglycaemia). This causes light headedness and fatigue, and is also responsible for a host of longer term health problems.
Does alcohol cause breast cancer?
We talk to our Chief Medical Advisor, Professor Paul Wallace to find out the facts about alcohol and breast cancer.
When asked to name the main health effects of drinking too much alcohol, many people will first say liver disease. Others will mention heart disease. Some will name mental health issues. Cancers are often low down on the public’s alcohol effects list.
But they shouldn’t be – especially breast cancer.
It is clear from a number of large scale studies that there is a link between alcohol consumption and cancer. Globally, one in five (21.6%) of all alcohol-related deaths are due to cancer. (1) And breast cancer is the most common cancer among women (2) and second only to lung cancer as a cause of cancer death in women. (3)
Professor Paul Wallace, Drinkaware’s Chief Medical Advisor, believes that more people should know that alcohol can increase women’s risk of getting breast cancer.
“My impression is that my patients don’t know about the link between alcohol and breast cancer any more than they do about the association between alcohol and fertility. We can do more to increase awareness.”
We spoke to Professor Wallace to get the facts about alcohol and breast cancer and learnt that:
- There is a lot of evidence to suggest that alcohol increases the risk of developing breast cancer.
- Drinking alcohol does not mean you will get breast cancer, it means your risk of developing it will be increased.
- How much you drink over your lifetime is what increases the risk.
Although alcohol does increase the risk, taken with all the other factors, its contribution to overall causation of breast cancer is estimated to be about 4%. The advice is that if you do regularly drink it should be within the government’s lower risk guidelines.
Alcohol and mental health
5. Alcohol can damage your memory
Soon after drinking alcohol, your brain processes slow down and your memory can be impaired. After large quantities of alcohol, the brain can stop recording into the ‘memory store’. That’s why you can wake up the next day with a ‘blank’ about what you said or did and even where you were. This short-term memory failure or ‘black out’ doesn’t mean that brain cells have been damaged, but frequent heavy sessions can damage the brain because of alcohol’s effect on brain chemistry and processes.
Drinking heavily over a long period of time can also have long-term effects on memory. Even on days when you don’t drink any alcohol, recalling what you did yesterday, or even where you have been earlier that day, become difficult.
Alcohol and mental health
4. Alcohol is linked to suicide, self-harm and psychosis
Alcohol can make people lose their inhibitions and behave impulsively, so it can lead to actions they might not otherwise have taken – including self-harm and suicide (3).
According to the NHS in Scotland, more than half of people who ended up in hospital because they’d deliberately injured themselves said they’ve drunk alcohol immediately before or while doing it. 27% of men and 19% of women gave alcohol as the reason for self-harming (4).
Extreme levels of drinking (such as more than 30 units per day for several weeks) can occasionally cause ‘psychosis’. It’s a severe mental illness where hallucinations and delusions of persecution develop. Psychotic symptoms can also occur when very heavy drinkers suddenly stop drinking and develop a condition known as ‘delirium tremens’ – symptoms include body tremors and confusion.
Mindaware 