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If US research is anything to go by, a good number of people will have already given up on their New Year’s resolutions.
But it turns out, that one to quit drinking might be good for your health – even in the short term.
New Scientist teamed up with experts to look at the effects of abstaining from alcohol for a month. While the results aren't anywhere near conclusive, they are telling.
“What you have is a pretty average group of British people who would not consider themselves heavy drinkers, yet stopping drinking for a month alters liver fat, cholesterol and blood sugar, and helps them lose weight,” says Moore. “If someone had a health product that did all that in one month, they would be raking it in.”
If nothing else, not drinking means you can avoid the hangover.
When you're drinking, you lose about four times more liquid than you gain, which also causes the dehydration that leads to that wonderful cotton mouth and headache that come with a hangover. Ever wonder why exactly dehydration causes a headache? It's because your organs are so desperate they steal water from your brain, which causes your brain to shrink. A shrunken brain pulls on the membranes that connect the brain to the skull, and that, naturally, hurts like a mother.
We’ll look more at drinking next week, with Jackson Wood, who stopped drinking just over a year ago and and says “I never drank to black out. I always drank to the point where bad decisions started to look like good decisions. It wasn’t making me sharper and it definitely wasn’t helping me win friends. No need for the gory details: you get the picture.”
