Alcohol damage

What damage does alcohol do to our bodies?

Over time, it increases the risk of developing a long list of health conditions including breast cancer, oral cancers, heart disease, strokes and cirrhosis of the liver

We know that drinking too much alcohol is bad for us. It gives us hangovers, makes us feel tired and does little for our appearance - and that is just the morning afterwards.Continue reading the main story

Research shows that a high alcohol intake can also damage our mental health, impair memory skills and reduce fertility.

The direct link between alcohol and the liver is well understood

But what about the impact of alcohol on other organs?

Numerous heart studies suggest that moderate alcohol consumption helps protect against heart disease by raising good cholesterol and stopping the formation of blood clots in the arteries.

However, drinking more than three drinks a day has been found to have a direct and damaging effect on the heart.

Heavy drinking, particularly over time, can lead to high blood pressure, alcoholic cardiomyopathy, congestive heart failure and stroke.

Heavy drinking also puts more fat into the circulation of the body.

The link between alcohol and cancer is well established, says Cancer Research UK.

A study published in the BMJ this year estimated that alcohol consumption causes at least 13,000 cancer cases in the UK each year

About 9,000 cases in men and 4,000 in women.

Cancer experts say that for every additional 10g per day of alcohol drunk, the risk of breast cancer increases by approximately 7-12%.

Continue reading the main story

A recent report in BioMed Central's Immunology journal found that alcohol impairs the body's ability to fight off viral infections.

And studies on fertility suggest that even light drinking can make women less likely to conceive while heavy drinking in men can lower sperm quality and quantity.

For bowel cancer, previous studies show that increasing alcohol intake by 100g per week increases the cancer risk by 19%.

Why alcohol has this negative effect on all elements of our health could be down to acetaldehyde - the product alcohol is broken down into in the body.

Acetaldehyde is toxic and has been shown to damage DNA.

Dr KJ Patel, from the Medical Research Council's laboratory of molecular biology in Cambridge, recently completed a study into the toxic effects of alcohol on mice.

His research implies that a single binge-drinking dose of alcohol during pregnancy may be sufficient to cause permanent damage to a baby's genome.

Foetal alcohol syndrome, he says, "can give rise to children who are seriously damaged, born with head and facial abnormalities and mental disabilities".

Alcohol is a well-established cancer causing agent, he says.

You cannot get a cancer cell occurring unless DNA is altered.

When you drink, the acetaldehyde is corrupting the DNA of life and puts you on the road to cancer.

One of most common genetic defects in man is our inability to counteract the toxicity of alcohol.

Dr Nick Sheron, who runs the liver unit at Southampton General Hospital, says the mechanisms by which alcohol does damage are not quite so clear cut.

Continue reading the main story

The toxicity of alcohol is complex, but we do know there is a clear dose relationship.

With alcoholic liver disease, the greater the alcohol intake per week the greater the liver damage and that increases exponentially for someone drinking six to eight bottles or more of wine in that period, for example.

Over the past 20 to 30 years, Dr Sheron says, deaths from liver disease have increased by 500%, with 85% of those due to alcohol.

Only in the last few years has that rise slowed down.

Alcohol has a bigger impact than smoking on our health because alcohol kills at a younger age.

The average age of death for someone with alcoholic liver disease is their 40s.

'More harmful than heroin or crack'

Alcohol is undoubtedly a public health issue too.

Earlier this year, NHS figures showed that alcohol related hospital admissions has reached record levels in 2010.

Over a million people were admitted in 2009-10, compared with 945,500 in 2008-09 and 510,800 in 2002-03.

Nearly two in three of those cases were men.

At the same time the charity Alcohol Concern predicted the number of admissions would reach 1.5m a year by 2015 and cost the NHS £3.7bn a year.

Last year, a study in The Lancet concluded that alcohol is more harmful than heroin or crack when the overall dangers to the individual and society are considered.

The study by the Independent Scientific Committee on drugs also ranked alcohol as three times more harmful than cocaine or tobacco because it is so widely used.

So how much alcohol is too much?

What can we safely drink?

The government guidelines on drinking are being reviewed at present.

They currently say that a women should not drink more than two to three units of alcohol per day and a man three to four units a day.

But Paul Wallace, a GP and chief medical adviser of Drinkaware, says people are just not aware of the alcohol content of a large glass of wine.

Most of us don't realise what we're drinking and you can very easily slip beyond acceptable limits.

Katherine Brown, head of research at the Institute of Alcohol Studies, says the current guidelines and how they are communicated may be giving the public misleading information.

We need to be very careful when suggesting there is a 'safe' level of drinking for the population.

Rather, we need to explain that there are risks associated with alcohol consumption, and that the less you drink the lower your risk is of developing health problems.

We hope the government use this as an opportunity to help change perceptions about regular drinking being a normal, risk-free practice."

Dr Wallace wants the government to do a better job on the message it sends out by explaining the alcohol guidelines in units per week, rather than per day - no more than 21 units for men, 14 units for women per week.

Dr Sheron agrees: There is no such thing as a safe level, but the government has got to draw a line somewhere.

It's a balance.

People like having a drink, but they have to accept there's a risk-benefit ratio

Philippa Roxby - BBC

Coffee adiction

Britain's caffeine boom: 

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Why can't we wake up without smelling the coffee? 
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We now spend more on coffee in a year than we do on our energy bills
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And as the price of beans rises, we respond by becoming ever more fussy about our drinks.
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In the classic science-fiction novel "The Space Merchants" by Frederick Pohl and CM Kornbluth, published in 1952, an overpopulated Earth is run by giant multinational companies.
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The population is kept in ignorance of its parlous state by giant advertising agencies and the workforce is fed on slices of synthetic protein called Chicken Little, washed down by something called Coffiest.
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In this blandly zomboid future-world, everyone drinks Coffiest, day and night. 
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It's mandatory. 
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And it's addictive. 
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Let the book's protagonist, Mitchell Courtnay, explain: "...each sample of Coffiest contains three milligrams of a simple alkaloid. 
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Nothing harmful. 
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But definitely habit-forming. 
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After 10 weeks the customer is hooked for life. 
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It would cost him at least five thousand dollars for a cure.
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So it's simpler for him to go right on drinking Coffiest – three cups with every meal and a pot beside his bed at night, just as it says on the jar.
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Can you imagine being so addicted to a warm beverage? 
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So hooked that you drink it all the time, several times a day, at home, on the way to work, at the workplace, at lunchtime, at tea...?
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Oh no, hang on, we're doing just that already. 
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We're now drinking coffee as never before. 
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Every week, across the UK, we consume 511 millions cups of coffee.
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Almost half of them in the franchises that dominate the nation's high streets and shopping malls.
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A few years ago, Starbucks ran a TV commercial that encouraged coffee-lovers to think of their high street outlets as a second home.
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Somewhere to relax, read the papers, meet your partner or write a novel on your Vaio laptop. 
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Now the coffee lover has a second, third and fourth home in which to kick back. 
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If Starbucks loses its charm, he can transfer his laid-back allegiance to Caffè Concerto, Caffè Nero, Costa Coffee, Coffee Republic or Caffè Ritazza.
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Visitors to Westfield, the giant shopping mall in west London, can choose between eighteen different outlets.
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That include two Starbucks, a Ca'puccino, a Love Coffee, an Apostrophe and an Espressamente Illy. 
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You think there are too many? 
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The Commons Speaker's errant wife, Sally Bercow, recently went on Radio 4's Today programme to discuss the fate of high street clothing shops. 
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They should wake up and smell the coffee, she said, darkly, because they'll all end up being coffee franchises sooner or later.
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How did we become so enslaved? 
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We all know people who proclaim that they cannot face the world, cannot think straight, cannot recognise elementary shapes, simply cannot operate until they've had their first hit of Taylor's Rich Italian Dark Roast in the morning. 
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We're used to seeing the Starbucks Claw phenomenon – the hand of an otherwise ordinary-seeming mortal, clutched around a carton of skinny latte (or whatever) as he or she wanders dazedly down the street, like a large baby unable to leave off sucking a teat.
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I've lost count of the people on Desert Island Discs (Sir Simon Rattle was one, John Cale of the Velvet Underground another) who've asked for an Italian coffee machine and grinder as the greatest luxury they can think of.
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Why do we queue at Starbucks for hot milky drinks which have only traces of caffeine in them? 
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Because we're addicted to the whole procedure behind the Costa bar; the steaming, the percolating, the drip-feed of richness, the warm milky smoothness of the result, the fugitive aromas of vanilla, caramel, honey, nuts and chocolate. 
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Like the Lotos-eaters in Homer's Odyssey, we enter an altered, milk-fed state, forgetful of friends, home and all sense of urgency
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And we seem to be heedless of its alarming cost. 
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According to research, coffee gourmets spend £2,000 a year on the stuff, while merely everyday drinkers spend £450 a year – more than they shell out on the average person's domestic electricity bill.
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And it's not just some yoof-culture phenomenon: the over-55s ladle an average of 15 cups a week down their gullets. 
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You'd think the mature drinker would know better. 
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But then, we've always been a bit excessive when it comes to Coffea arabica.
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The first people who tried roasting coffee beans in liquid were Sufi mystics in 13th-century Yemen. 
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The wine they drank at religious ceremonies made them sleepy and they needed a substitute that kept them awake and able to handle the long hours of prayer: coffee was a perfect solution. 
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From Yemen it spread across the Middle East and North Africa, borne by Muslim pilgrims and dervishes.
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English travellers in antique lands noted sourly its prevalence among the unwashed: Anthony Sherley wrote in 1599 about meeting "damned infidels drinking a certaine liquor, which they do call Coffe". 
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European historians have long disputed which country first played host to the noble bean. 
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According to Alan Davidson in The Penguin Companion To Food, France was the true pioneer. 
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The first coffee shops sprang up in Paris in 1672. 
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At the fabulous parties thrown in the late 1680s by the Turkish ambassador, the city's grandes dames were served "the choicest Mocha coffee in tiny cups of eggshell porcelain, hot strong and fragrant, poured out in saucers of gold and silver, placed on embroidered silk doylies fringed with gold bullion" by "the black slaves of the Ambassador..."
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A far cry from Caffè Nero, isn't it? 
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The UK's first coffee house was opened in Oxford in 1650 by a Turkish Jew called Jacob. 
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The first of a million London coffee houses was opened two years later in the City of London by the east-European Pasqua Rosee. 
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The London Stock Exchange started life as Jonathan's Coffee House in Change Alley, where merchants and entrepreneurs used to meet to talk finance. 
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By 1675, there were 3,000 coffee houses in England – despite the hostility of King Charles II, who suspected they might be hotbeds of sedition and tried to remove their licences, but there was such an outcry, he was forced to withdraw his plans.
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Now there are 14,022 coffee shops in the UK and they brought their owners £5bn last year. 
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That's a year-on-year increase of 12.9 per cent.
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This trend can't continue, can it? 
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Oh yes it can. 
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More and more branded coffee franchises are scheduled to open. 
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There were 4,645 Costas and Starbucks and Republics and Ritazzas in the UK last year. 
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By the end of 2013, it is conservatively estimated that there will be 5,719 of them. 
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And there are two other trends that should give the everyday coffee drinker pause. 
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One is price and the other is sophistication.
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The price of coffee beans has increased alarmingly and will continue to do so. 
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It virtually doubled in the last 12 months – and nobody quite knows why. 
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They're lost in the murky depths of global commodity markets.
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Coffee drinkers (and growers) found they had an unlikely champion in the shape of Howard Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks, in May this year when he publicly denounced the price increase. "
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The price of coffee is at a 34-year high," he told Channel 4. "
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We're seeing a hundred per cent rise. 
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I could understand it if there were some supply and demand issue, or some climate problem, but we don't see any. 
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I've had conversations with people who grow and export coffee and it seems that what's driving these record prices is speculation. 
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We don't [know] which hedge funds and index funds have been engaged in this speculation because there's no transparency. 
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But there will be a ton of money made here and the people who most deserve to profit from it – the coffee farmers – won't get it."
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Starbucks decided it would be harmful to its customers to raise prices across the board, so it didn't; then again, it is already charging £3.45 for a venti white caffè mocha. 
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But it knows it cannot hold out for long, because the world's demand for coffee is increasing.
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Last year, global consumption went up by 2.5 per cent. It can only increase further, because of a crucial change in the world coffee market: 
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China and India have woken up and sniffed the Java. 
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The number of coffee houses in China will triple in the next three years. 
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Tea consumption in India has declined ever since the subcontinent's population discovered the lure of the bean, the roast and the cafetière.
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As demand rises, traditional suppliers in Brazil and Columbia will struggle to match it – and the price to the coffee shops will consequently rise and rise. 
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The Costas and Starbucks which buy the beans won't be able to maintain their old prices without cutting into their profits, so the cost to coffee drinkers will rise exponentially. 
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We will, in other words, pay much more for our caffeine-based addiction in the future. 
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And will we cut down on our coffee consumption? 
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Will we hell.
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John Walsh

Control is not working

Watching people pretend that they have things under control is interesting.
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Sometimes really amusing because if there is one thing for certain in this world it is that we do not have things under control.

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For short periods of our lives we might believe this to be possible

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But then watch those you know trying to live a life ruled by reason and logic.
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A scientific life if you will.
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No way!
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Life cannot be run as a piece of machinery however much this might appeal to you.
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A life where control and certainty prevail.
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Many have tried and many more will.
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However life does not allow such mechanistic pleasures to prevail.
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Sooner or later nature steps in and shakes things up.
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And this has never been more true than the period we are in now.
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For a period of time humanity thought that the 60's through the 90's were the norm in terms of nature's behaviour.
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Now we are learning the hard way that they were not.
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The period we are in now with it's more brutal weather.
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More disasters.
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More uncertainty.
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This is probably the norm.
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And the sooner we get used to this idea the sooner we face reality.
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The Global Warming game was a great idea to tax us further.
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However it was a con so many of those scientists making their living from Global Warming quickly moved on to Climate Change.
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So much easier because with Climate Change you can explain away anything.
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Thus totally ignoring the fact that this planet has always undergone Climate Change.
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Change well documented by more honest scientists not so involved in pretending that this is something new.
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What is so great about Climate Change is that you can keep right on taxing the masses while excusing your lack of understanding about what is really going on.
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Brilliant we now have endless crisis and uncertainty in our weather both locally and globally.

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And that is just the weather

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All other aspects of our lives are becoming more uncertain too

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Thanks to an imploding financial system. 

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 In our own lives change is opposed by endless rules and regulations. 

Barriers to entry everywhere in everything.

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Looking around it is the same conflicting interests of modern politics cancelling out any meangingful change. 

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Add in of course all the other special interest groups and other institutions that thwart any purposeful transformation. 

They leave us helpless, buffeted by forces beyond our control.

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Be it the weather, our own private lives, our economy whatever, all is seemingly beyond our control.

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Or is it?

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Notice how our own efforts at control do not really work, over time

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So to the best efforts of government and large corporations to control do not work either, over time.

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And into our current parlous situation arrive these clear observations.

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Leaders with no clue what to do except same old, same old ideas.

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Ever more controls.

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Won't work, they know it we know it.

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Notice new initiatives emerging over the last few months.

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People are beginning to wake up to the mess around them.

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Slowly realising that our leaders are a major part of the problem.

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Leaders too easily influenced by the rich, the bankers, the special interest groups of corporations and others who prevail upon them to do their bidding.
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That for change to come people everywhere must now get involved.
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Change is upon us anyway faster and faster each year.
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How it turns out is up to us
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Being a spectator in one of the most important periods of our history does not do it.
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Everyone has a voice
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Let everyone use theirs in the way best suited to their skills.
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Become involved in those aspects of your life where you can make a difference.