Take care of your liver

[audreyh1]

When your water comes from lead-lined aqueducts, drinking pretty much anything else is a good idea!

True, but I think they also had trouble with lead or some other contamination in their amphorae used to store and transport wine.

Here’s a good one:
The Disturbingly Long History of Lead Toxicity in Winemaking https://www.winemag.com/2020/07/20/lead-toxicity-wine-history/

 

[athena53]

I don't think athena53 needs any reminders on that score [exercise]

Thanks, and you're right. I think that one thing that kept me from drinking at lunch, even business lunches, was that typically I hit the gym right after work. Alcohol and exercise do not mix. I was in the insurance business and things calmed down after they cracked down on "three-martini lunches" but before that I knew quite a few older executives who had drinking problems. When my company moved out the suburbia, nowhere near any bars unless you got in your car, one guy used to go out and visit the brown bag in his car a few times a day.

 

[Jenna]

There is new evidence that Vegi/Seed oils are tied to many modern diseases. Tucker Goodrich and Dr Cate Shanahan both have lots of interview on youtube. Since giving them up/avoiding them for almost 3 weeks, Im feeling great. It takes several years to rid your body fat of these oils, but the benefits are promising.

 

[mpeirce]

Yes, I have to be careful about this. I may not get an immediate headache but I'll wake up in the middle of the night with one and possibly with bizarre dreams to go with it.

When I drink beer I almost always have lots of vivid dreams.

I almost never drink beer any more and nothing else produces these weird dreams. Not sure what's up with that.

 

[Chuckanut]

When your water comes from lead-lined aqueducts, drinking pretty much anything else is a good idea!

Didn't they also use lead in their eating pottery? Supposedly, the mental issues associated with lead intake contributed to the fall of the Empire. Or have I been lead astray?

 

[audreyh1]

Didn't they also use lead in their eating pottery? Supposedly, the mental issues associated with lead intake contributed to the fall of the Empire. Or have I been lead astray?

Yeah - see my article link above.

 

[Aerides]

Just a PSA that some borderline liver tests results are caused or cured by diet or lifestyle. DH had a test that was iffy for a while, but his prior doc was kinda relaxed about it and never took it further as DH's diet and drinking is totally fine.

Fast forward to a new Primary who wasn't as casual, several more tests and specialists before his ferritin level was found to be an issue. He has hemochromatosis, a not terribly common, mostly a genetic thing. Basically his blood makes too much iron. Untreated it can be dire.

Luckily treatment is easy enough and it was diagnosed before any damage had happened. He now has regular phlebotomies and keeps his ferritin in check at the low end of normal, as well as avoiding any iron in vitamins and limiting certain foods.

So, anyone going "welp i eat well, don't drink, exercise, my liver must be fine" - yeah still get your tests. A lot of these things don't show up in symptoms until you are rather ill.

 

[Scuba]

Thanks for the condolences. Our friend definitely drank a lot of wine over decades, and he didn’t exercise much. He didn’t eat processed foods often, but loved olive oil, bread, and cheese and was a bit overweight. Still, his death was a bit shocking as the day before, he was feeling great and optimistic about his recovery. Then he got a brain bleed and went downhill fast.

 

[Koogie]

Alcohol and exercise do not mix.

You've clearly never been around any "Hash House Harriers: The drinking club with a running problem"

 

[audreyh1]

Thanks for the condolences. Our friend definitely drank a lot of wine over decades, and he didn’t exercise much. He didn’t eat processed foods often, but loved olive oil, bread, and cheese and was a bit overweight. Still, his death was a bit shocking as the day before, he was feeling great and optimistic about his recovery. Then he got a brain bleed and went downhill fast.

Brain bleed - that doesn’t seem related to the liver.

 

[Amethyst]

This thread reminds me of a friend who lived in France for a number of years. She told me that the French, who drink a lot of wine and eat fatty foods, worry about their livers the way Americans worry about heart and blood vessel disease.

One night, the resident of a neighboring apartment was taken away in an ambulance. The next day, she overheard people saying "his liver exploded."

 

[Surewhitey]

Great improvement in your health stats! Did this correlate with your retirement? I like the color coded spreadsheet. I think I’ll make one like this for myself. Easy to spot trends and areas of concern.

Yes and no. I started "coasting" about the time my doc wanted to put me on a diabetes pill. Instead, I stopped corporate and started doing my own thing. Weight loss was the big driver in my improvement. Not going out for lunch every day was a big reason & eating way better than the past 25 years.

Doc decided to remove the sugar pill & one of the 2 blood pressure pills too. Probably haven't been this healthy in a couple of decades...

 

[audreyh1]

This thread reminds me of a friend who lived in France for a number of years. She told me that the French, who drink a lot of wine and eat fatty foods, worry about their livers the way Americans worry about heart and blood vessel disease.

One night, the resident of a neighboring apartment was taken away in an ambulance. The next day, she overheard people saying "his liver exploded."

Drinking lots and lots of wine can be challenging to the liver, but fatty food is not.

 

[NW-Bound]

A while ago, I read somewhere that [-]Belgium[/-] Luxembourg had surpassed France as the #1 wine drinking nation.

Just now, check again, and France is shown as #1 in 2019, with a per capita annual consumption of 6.74 liters of pure alcohol. Using an average of 12% alcohol content of wine, I compute an annual consumption of 56 liters/year, or about 1.5 bottles/week.

Does not seem like a lot, but that includes children and people who do not drink. The heavy drinkers may do 2x that perhaps, or maybe even more, like a bottle/day?

But that is still nothing. What's scary is this. The statistics show that back in 1960, the French per capita consumption was 20.56 liters of alcohol. That works out to 171 liters of wine per year, or 3.3 liters of wine per week, or 4.4 bottles/week. And that's average for every citizen of France, including children.

With the per capita consumption in 2019 dropping to 1/3 that in 1960, no wonder I read that Europeans don't drink wine as much as they used to. The surplus makes wine so cheap, there was one year the EU had to buy wine at a price of pennies/liter and distilled it to make ethanol to mix with gasoline.


PS. I made a grave error in assigning the total alcohol consumption to wine drinking. That's not true, as all countries also drink hard liquor, beer, etc... But France also drinks a lot of wine per capita, with Portugal claiming the top spot some years. Italy also follows closely.

Instead of the per capita wine consumption of 56 liters/year that I computed, France only drinks 40.7 liters of wine. The difference is due to other alcoholic beverages.

 

[audreyh1]

German beer consumption is what blows my mind.

Visiting Bavaria, and seeing how many locals were drinking multiple liters of beer in the afternoon, I had to look it up. Still couldn’t believe that the most popular size was the one liter mug (eine mass).

Bavaria - 170 liters of beer per person per year.

Overall, Czech Republic beats everyone else. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_beer_consumption_per_capita

For Germany - beer consumption has actually dropped a lot since the 90s. https://www.statista.com/statistics/540025/beer-consumption-per-capita-in-germany/

 

[Markola]

Yeah, well, we ain’t so hot ourselves, as we always show up far behind all of those hard-drinking countries in life expectancy. The U.S. is actually going backwards. It’s a far more complicated issue than booze, of course.

But for now, “Eat our shorts, Panama! We’re Number 46! Yeah!”

https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/

 

[EastWest Gal]

Brain bleed - that doesn’t seem related to the liver.

The liver plays a central role in coagulation. Liver dysfunction can cause abnormal bleeding.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11928081/

 

[audreyh1]

Thanks!

 

[braumeister]

German beer consumption is what blows my mind.

Visiting Bavaria, and seeing how many locals were drinking multiple liters of beer in the afternoon, I had to look it up. Still couldn’t believe that the most popular size was the one liter mug (eine mass).]

But it's much better beer than the mass market stuff in this country!

One of my favorite statistics is this one. If you have ever been to Oktoberfest, you have noticed how often the bands play the "Ein Prosit" song, which always ends with a big swallow from your Maß. One of the organizers once told me that the reason they play that so much is that every time they do, roughly 1,000 liters go down the hatch. That's why there are no beer delivery trucks at the Oktoberfest grounds. It's actually delivered via underground pipelines from the breweries.

 

[Helen]

I noticed the biergartens in Munich were packed, but I never saw a single cop or security guard. I also never saw anyone become unruly.

 

[audreyh1]

I noticed the biergartens in Munich were packed, but I never saw a single cop or security guard. I also never saw anyone become unruly.

Everyone is very chill.

 

[Chuckanut]

Here's a interesting video for the ladies and even us guys:

Perhaps we can learn something from the Wine Moms who seem to be all the rage today. Maybe it's time to break out the Baby Puffs and save our livers.

 

[RAE]

There is new evidence that Vegi/Seed oils are tied to many modern diseases. Tucker Goodrich and Dr Cate Shanahan both have lots of interview on youtube. Since giving them up/avoiding them for almost 3 weeks, Im feeling great. It takes several years to rid your body fat of these oils, but the benefits are promising.

Yep, and the evidence you mention has actually been around for a while now. I have a feeling that, some years from now, it will become very clear that consumption of the industrial seed oils is a huge contributor to all sorts of chronic disease, including heart disease and cancer. I'm convinced that if you want to stay healthy, it's important to avoid (or at least minimize consumption) of both industrial seed oils, and high fructose corn syrup. These are both man-made concoctions that our bodies did not evolve with, so trying to process them leads to problems. One reason I don't eat restaurant food as much as I used to is that most restaurants still use industrial seed oils for most cooking that involves use of oil. Anything deep-fried in these oils is particularly bad.

 

[audreyh1]

Yep, and the evidence you mention has actually been around for a while now. I have a feeling that, some years from now, it will become very clear that consumption of the industrial seed oils is a huge contributor to all sorts of chronic disease, including heart disease and cancer. I'm convinced that if you want to stay healthy, it's important to avoid (or at least minimize consumption) of both industrial seed oils, and high fructose corn syrup. These are both man-made concoctions that our bodies did not evolve with, so trying to process them leads to problems. One reason I don't eat restaurant food as much as I used to is that most restaurants still use industrial seed oils for most cooking that involves use of oil. Anything deep-fried in these oils is particularly bad.

Yep, I avoid those and also table sugar and other sweeteners (honey, maple syrup, etc.), including artificial sweeteners, juices.

 

[Scuba]

The liver plays a central role in coagulation. Liver dysfunction can cause abnormal bleeding.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11928081/

Yes, I looked it up. It seems when the liver is not functioning well, not only can it cause brain hemorrhage, but it can disrupt so many other bodily functions. Truly a horrible disease.