The Curative Effects of Antioxidants and Nutrition on

Alcohol-Induced Damage

By Leah Roberts

Millions of people indulge in drinking alcoholic beverages; many of them do so

excessively, others only socially. Few of these people are aware of any of the dangers

associated with drinking alcohol and many have been convinced by the media that some

alcohol is actually good for them. Drinking any alcohol is never without consequence;

even social drinkers have a negative impact on the cell tissue of their bodies. The human

body metabolizes alcohol in ways that leave toxic residues and byproducts in the cell

tissue. These byproducts are free radicals and cause various kinds of damage to the

specific organs of the body. Compounding these problems, is the fact that alcohol

drinkers tend to eat poorly, either not enough food or the wrong kinds of food and

exacerbate the malnutrition that we see in alcoholics. In order to fight these harmful

effects, we need to provide the body with the necessary nutrients to help counteract the

free radical damage. There are anti-oxidant nutrients in many foods, and also in

supplements, that can aid in reversing damage caused by alcohol consumption.

Those who are heavy drinkers are at the greatest risk for health problems. A

heavy drinker is defined as someone who consumes 50g or more of alcohol per day. This

amount is equivalent to 4 or 5 12-ounce beers, 4 or 5 shots of liquor, or 4 or 5 4-ounce

glasses of wine. Doctors Josh Levitsky, M.D. and Mark E. Mailliard, M.D. stated in their

Seminars on Liver Disease, that the revised “hepatotoxic threshold” when alcoholic liver

disease is likely to develop is in men who drink 40g (4 drinks) per day and in women

who drink 20g (2 drinks) per day over a period of 15 to 20 years. Something is to be said
for those people who binge drink too. These people are actually worse off health-wise

than the people who have an occasional drink with dinner or similar instance. The binge

drinker will literally pollute their system with a large amount of alcohol in a short period

of time. This amount of alcohol consumed so quickly can wreak havoc on the body to a

greater extent than it would with the heavy drinker, who has built up a tolerance over a

period of time. It is binge drinkers that are at a huge risk of alcohol poisoning, stroke, and

heart failure.

Drinking alcohol is synonymous to drinking a toxin in the body. The ethanol in

alcoholic beverages undergoes an oxidation and forms acetaldehyde, which undergoes

further metabolism and reduces to acetate. These metabolic reactions generate free

radicals which can negatively affect cell integrity when antioxidant mechanisms of cells

are no longer able to counteract the damage from the ingested ethanol.

There are numerous studies reporting the effects of alcohol on the various cell

tissues; most popular, are the brain, liver, heart, and musculature. Most commonly

known, are the problems that occur in the liver and the brain; most people who drink

alcohol have heard that they are killing brain cells, or that they could get cirrhosis of the

liver. Few actually think they are, themselves, at risk. Fewer still, know the extent of the

damage they are at risk of having. In the following paragraphs, I will explore these health

problems and the antioxidants and nutrients necessary to prevent permanent damage to

the body.

As I said above, cirrhosis is the common association made with alcohol

consumption, but there are earlier stages of liver disease that are just as medically

important. The first problem to occur in the liver of the alcohol indulgent individual is
called “fatty liver” or simple steatosis. According to emedicine.com, fatty liver develops

in any and all people who ingest 60g or more per day of alcohol. The next disease in

progression is alcoholic hepatitis, hepatic steatosis, and finally, cirrhosis which scars and

deforms the liver; cirrhosis is incurable and fatal. Alcoholic liver disease is the third most

common cause of preventable death in middle-aged people in the U.S. According to the

University of Southern California, Department of Surgery, Liver Transplant Program &

Center for Liver Disease, 15 – 20 thousand people die yearly in the U.S. due to Alcoholic

Liver Disease, and costs involved with ALD are estimated to exceed $2.5 billion each

year. At present, ALD is incurable, according to their literature. It should also be known

that women have been found to be more prone to ALD than men in many studies,

speculatively because they metabolize it differently, and because of the interactions with

female hormones. For both men and women, nutrition is a major factor in the

development of ALD. Protein and calorie deficiencies go hand in hand with ALD

because of the poor eating habits and malabsorption of nutrients by the small intestines

that drinking alcohol causes.

Polyunsaturated fats are known to be very important in studies on ALD, because

they accentuate alcohol induced oxidative injury. Feeding saturated fat tends to show

remarkable prevention or accelerated recovery in lab studies. Iron also seems to make

ALD worsen because of its pro-oxidant qualities; as does copper, and drinking alcohol

enhances the absorption of iron from food sources and then the body stores the iron in the

hepatocytes and Kupfer cells in the liver.

In the brain, alcohol slows the transmission of chemical signals. Ethanol

molecules steal the receptor sites that would usually be for glutamate, and over time the
brain attempts to compensate by making more of these “NMDA” receptors on cells; this

can be noted as a sign of tolerance. Because of this accommodation, and other

neurological factors less understood, when no alcohol is present, the person feels agitated

and anxious; these are the addictive signs that alcohol produces. Thiamin deficiency

associated with chronic alcohol consumption is another factor of brain injury, according

to an article in Alcoholic Research & Health, Spring 2003. They said that this thiamine

deficiency can cause Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a common brain disease in

alcoholics that involves dementia and psychosis. Those who suffer from this syndrome

have problems remembering old information (retrograde amnesia) for example; they

could have a conversation about some event in their life and not remember this

conversation an hour later. Alcohol consumption also decreases learning ability, memory

and decision making ability and adversely affects behavior. This affect on the brain and

thinking and learning abilities is even more significant in young alcohol abusers. Studies

of various sources have shown that, first of all, children born to alcohol using parents

have trouble concentrating. Even more problems occur if the adolescent drinks alcohol,

because the young brain is more vulnerable to alcohol than the adult brain. Recently,

scientists have found that there are parts of the brain that continue to undergo refinement

into the early 20’s; these include changes in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for

processing complex information. Studies involving young people show that those who

begin using alcohol in their teens have smaller hippocampal memory areas of their brains

than non-drinkers. In addition to this loss of memory, drinkers of all ages lose the ability

to realize they have lost some mental capacity.

 The heart is also adversely affected by alcohol. Alcoholic heart disease is well

recognized and chronic alcohol ingestion is a leading cause of secondary cardiomyopathy

according to the National Institute of Health, because of long-term alcohol consumption.

Indulging in alcoholic beverages can also bring about arrhythmias, angina pectoris, and

most commonly, left ventricular hypertrophy with mild systolic/ diastolic dysfunction.

The N.I.H. also suggests that myocardial abnormalities contribute to a greatly increased

risk of having an arrhythmia and sudden cardiac death among heavy alcohol drinkers.

Knowing that alcohol causes all of these health problems should be enough to

make it unappealing to us so we would not poison our bodies in this way. Unfortunately,

many people refuse to believe the scientifically proven facts about alcohol’s toxic effects.

Aside of the health risks, there are also psychologically important risk factors associated

with alcohol indulgence. Alcohol is a known depressant and can bring about clinical

depression and suicidal thoughts. Alcohol acts on the behavioral centers of the brain and

causes the drinker to behave in ways that are belligerent, aggressive, insensitive to others’

feelings, and sometimes abusive or even homicidal. Alcohol is a major influence in the

tearing apart of families and divorce. There are some scientists in Australia that believe

alcohol would be an illegal drug if it had been discovered recently, and had not gotten the

stronghold in society that it has had for centuries.

Nutritionally, there is nothing good, and all bad results for drinking alcohol. It is

widely known that people who drink alcohol have poor diets, as mentioned earlier. These

people substitute alcohol carbohydrates for real food, and so become deficient in protein,

many vitamins and minerals, and also calorie deficient. As also mentioned earlier, the

absorption in the intestines of various nutrients is diminished. All these factors lead to
malnutrition in the drinking individual. The body desperately tries to get the nutrients it

needs for normal physiologic functions, and resorts to breaking down fat and muscle

stores as a consequence. Alcohol contributes to the formation of acquired skeletal

myopathy, and chronic alcoholics have significant reductions in the levels of muscular

glutathione peroxidase as compared with controls in studies on the adverse effects of

alcohol on the muscles of the body. Knowing that alcohol robs the body of muscle tissue

when adequate nutrition is withheld, one should make extra efforts to eat a proper diet

when they refuse to abstain from drinking alcohol.

It is obvious that the best solution to avoiding alcoholic health problems is to

completely avoid alcohol. By avoiding alcohol, those inflicted with secondary frontal

lobe shrinkage can hope to recover brain volume and restore blood flow. Complete

abstinence from drinking can also return the condition of simple steatosis in the liver to

normal in a remarkable 2-4 weeks. For those who lack the will power to do this

themselves, there are medications such as Antabuse, which makes drinking alcohol

physically unbearable, and more recently developed, is Naltrexone, which reduces the

alcohol cravings.

Once consumption of alcohol is cessated, there are some antioxidants that can

help reverse or heal the damage caused by alcohol. This is based on the chance that

cessation occurs before damage to the brain and/ or organs is permanent.

N-acetyl cysteine is an aldehyde-binding thiol compound that helps to correct

high blood pressure and other adverse changes caused by ingesting ethanol. When

alcohol is metabolized by the body, the resulting byproducts are acetaldehyde and

malondialdehyde; both of which cause major free radical damage. Acetaldehyde is very
reactive and is presumably the cause of alcohol induced hypertension, elevated levels of

cytosolic free calcium, and renal vascular changes. N-acetylcysteine binds acetaldehyde,

preventing damage from occurring in proteins.

Scientific studies using mice and rats have shown that L-cysteine, L-ascorbic

acid, and DL-thioctic acid made a significant reduction in acetaldehyde levels in

experiments conducted in the late 70’s. More recent studies involving guinea pigs in the

late 90’s showed that taking ascorbic acid as Vitamin C regularly can decrease the

residual levels of ethanol and acetaldehyde in the liver and brain.

We have found green tea to have antioxidant properties and scientific studies with

green tea and alcohol consumption have proved that green tea can prevent the changes

observed after ethanol intoxication, and it also protects membrane phospholipids from

enhanced peroxidation that occurs with alcohol consumption.

Still more research has been done to find that the antioxidant properties of grape

seed extract can be helpful in curving the damage to bodily tissues caused by alcohol.

One particular study notes that grape seed extract has flavanoids which prevent the

increase in levels of neuronal lipofuscin formation caused by the ingestion of alcohol.

Zinc is another nutritional component that has been found to reduce the oxidative

damaging effects of alcohol. In a study reported by an article in the American Journal of

Pathology, zinc supplementation inhibited the build up of reactive oxygen species, and

prevented the associated damage from occurring in the liver. Zinc also seemed to help

increase the natural antioxidant performance involving glutathione and related enzyme

activities.
 In summary, alcohol causes oxidative damage in all body tissues, most

remarkably, the liver, brain, heart and muscles. One can potentially reduce or even

eliminate these effects by abstaining from drinking alcohol. One can also minimize the

damage by getting the proper nutrition by eating a balanced diet and supplementing the

body with antioxidants and certain vitamins which become depleted when drinking

alcohol.

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