How Alcohol and Sugar Affect Our Bodies – Especially If You Have an MTHFR Mutation

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Hi there, everyone, it's Dr. Donnie. And I just wanted to come on live tonight and tell you guys about my latest blog post that went up today. And I'll put the link here in the Facebook Live for you so you can all read the article. And I'm hoping it's really helpful for you and I'm looking forward to. If you're catching me live at the moment, please write in and say hi and let me know your thoughts on this topic if you have any questions. For me.

What I've noticed is a lot of patients, especially during the holidays, will say to me, what do I do? What can I do at a holiday event when, you know, really to be social would be to have a drink, have an alcoholic drink, or to potentially eat something that has, you know, more sugar in it or something that maybe you're trying to avoid because of health reasons. So the question is, what do I do? How can I get through that? And if I do have some alcohol or sugar, how is it affecting my health and how can I recover? Because that's the thing is that, you know, the people that I work with really have a mindset of wanting to be as healthy as they can be every day, if possible. And so they're making sometimes tough choices, or definitely choices to benefit their health, which might mean avoiding foods they're sensitive to, like gluten or avoiding sugar as much as possible because maybe they're trying to decrease their blood sugar levels or maybe they're trying to optimize their gut bacteria. And for a lot of my patients who have an MTHFR snp, they're trying to optimize their methylation. You know, they want to be getting the most out of their B vitamins and the most out of their health. Right. We want to be having as best energy as possible, sleeping well, focus, you know, efficiency, and really just enjoying our life and our families as much as possible, as well as preventing major health issues like heart disease and cancer and Alzheimer's disease. So to do all of that, to accomplish all that, we do need to be thinking about how things like alcohol and sugar affect our bodies. So in this blog post, that's what I talk about. I talk about really trying to translate the science into understandable way of thinking of what happens in the body when we consume either alcohol or sugar or both. So the thing with alcohol is definitely has to be detoxified in our liver. And yeah, our liver can do a certain amount of detoxifying alcohol. There is some genetics involved, like some of us like me, have gene snips that make it so, like, my liver just metabolizes alcohol much slower than most people. So it doesn't take very much alcohol for my body to be affected by it. And so keeping in mind that there is some genetic variation in terms of how your liver can metabolize alcohol, just like there's genetic variation in how our bodies metabolize sugar, too. How our propensity to diabetes, for example, is how well our body handles sugar. And in some ways, alcohol and sugar have some, you know, some similarities. They both do affect the liver, but in slightly different ways.

What happens with alcohol, we know for sure from research, is that it depletes our antioxidants, especially glutathione. Glutathione is one of our main antioxidants made in our liver, and I call it a cell protector. It protects our cells from damage just from day to day toxin exposure. And just being human, we want to have glutathione there. So if we get depleted in glutathione from alcohol exposure, then we're less able to protect our cells. And alcohol can also deplete the B vitamins and other nutrients as well. And of course, if there's too much alcohol exposure on a regular basis, it can actually cause liver damage. So, yes, there are some studies that show, you know, some small amount of, say, wine, which is really because the wine contains resveratrol, which is beneficial. But you have to weigh out the benefit of the resveratrol to the downside of too much alcohol and decide for yourself how much is the right amount for you. What they generally say is that for women, up to one drink per day, but that's really only not every day of the week. That's one up to one drink per day. I think it's three days a week. And for men up to age 65, it's more like two drinks per day, up to three or four days per week. And after age 65, it drops back down to the same as women, up to one drink per day. So say with a holiday party, you might find, you know, you're in a situation where you're having more than that amount, then there's some things you can do to help. And this is what I include in this article. There's six tips for recovery, and they include things like staying hydrated. So you can, even if you're at a holiday party having alcohol, then you can make sure that you're also drinking water. And if you wanted to avoid alcohol altogether at the Party, you could just choose, say a sparkling water. Sometimes sparkling water can make it seem like you're having a special drink, but it's not. Doesn't have an alcohol content. But definitely drink water no matter what because alcohol depletes your hydration. So you're going to need more water to make up for it. And the water helps your body detoxify. It also helps to. Because alcohol can throw off your blood sugar levels, it can help to eat, especially if you eat protein every, you know, I would say every meal or every four or five hours and including the day after. Because what can happen is, you know, say you go to a holiday party and then the next day you're going to want to also support your body a little more hydration and making sure you get protein every few hours. I always like to start the day with a protein shake, but it could be any other kind of protein and healthy fats and of course, healthy vegetables every few hours. And then you can help your body recovery. You can also do things like taking glutathione. You can do glutathione either in capsules or liquids. We have those at the Dr. Donnie store.

And you'll see there in the article, I think I have a couple other tips, including I mention the stress remedy as a possible solution. Like if you say you're coming into Thanksgiving week here or the holidays over the next month, you might then decide to use the stress remedy. There's a seven day stress remedy which you could even just do for four days if you wanted to as a recovery. Because what the stress remedy program does is it encourages you to do exactly as I'm describing. You know, more hydration, less sugar and alcohol, making sure you get your healthy proteins and fats every few hours through the day to balance your blood sugar using a protein shake, the Dr. Donnie protein shake, and getting enough sleep and getting some exercise, so doing. You could think of it as, you know, sort of these, that if the sugar and the alcohol are the stress on your system, then doing the stress remedy program is the way to help your body recover. Now, in terms of sugar, we don't always think of sugar as a source of inflammation. You know, I don't think that that's common thinking, but that is what happens. You know, the sugar actually multiple ways when it hits our bodies, it causes inflammatory responses. Like it starts to tell our digestive tract to make a little more inflammation. It tells all of the cells in the body to make inflammation and that inflammation then sends signals that causes inflammation in the liver Inflammation also slows down methylation. So methylation is the process by which our body uses our B vitamins to do all the good stuff that B vitamins do. And if our methylation process is slowed down by alcohol or inflammation, then our body's not going to use those B vitamins for good. It's going to get stuck in a traffic jam created by the alcohol and sugar. So just thinking through that way to realize, okay, yes, I might still choose to have some sugar and some alcohol and but I'm going to know that it's going to. It might cause traffic jams in my methylation and it might cause a traffic jam in my liver, and I'm going to want to support my body through that so that I can recover and get back to feeling well. Or you might choose, hey, because it has such an effect on my body, I'm going to try to get through the holidays with as little as possible. You know, I'm going to try to get through the holidays with the least alcohol and the least sugar. There's so many other ways to do it. There's, you know, again, so many things you could have to drink instead that don't have alcohol. One of one thing that I tend to do is that the, maybe you've noticed these drinks that are like a, I'm thinking like these root beer that's sweetened with stevia, for example, sometimes, or like a cream soda sweetened with stevia, because stevia is not an artificial sweetener and it's not a sugar. So it is have a sweetness. But at least you can have a, you know, carbonated. You know, if you just want to have a fun drink, that might be an option or certainly just sticking with water and you might find that you actually are motivating people to do the same. You know, others around you to actually make choices for their health because they're seeing you being so committed to making choices for your health.

All right, well, I'm glad you guys are here. I see, I see Melissa and Heather listening in and I'll post this here so you guys can all listen later. And yeah, I'm hoping that you get to check out the blog post and use it and learn from it. And if there's, and please comment back later even if there's things that, that have helped you. Hi there, Tina.

If you guys have anything that, you know, if you have any questions, those of you who are here about alcohol and sugar intake during the holidays, if there's things that have been challenging for you or ideas and how to support your body through that.

I was trying to find. I'll find it and I'll post it for you guys. There was a wine that I found out about that's an organic and sulfide free wine. And I tested it out on myself because I am so sensitive to alcohol and I found that it really was. I didn't have near the negative effect from it. So I'm gonna, I'll find that and I'll post it for you here so that you can also check out that wine. If you're someone who likes to have wine, but maybe you're. Maybe you're sensitive also to the pesticides and sulfites that are sometimes in wines and.

Yeah. So then the whole idea is to be able to support your health and support your body. So. Because isn't it a bummer when you get to January, right? All of us, we get to January and we're like, oh my gosh, what do we do to ourselves in December? You know, end of November and December with the holidays, it just, you end up feeling like you have to do a recovery. So what I'm thinking is if you have this information ahead of time, you can even support yourself during. Why not? Right? Why not support yourself during the holidays and then you can also do some recovery in the end, but this way you're prepared to get through these holiday parties and still feel your best. You know, we got a lot to get done, don't we? We want to feel good. So anyway, thanks for joining everyone and.

I wish I could see you guys, but I see your name so it's fun anyway to, to be here together and I look forward to your comments about the blog post and I hope you guys all have a really good Thanksgiving. Oh, that reminds me, I was just. I have a. Every year I've had a holiday recipe guide in like an ebook. And we're just finishing putting some final touches and new ideas into that recipe holiday guide. I should have it for you very soon. And I'll post it here and I'll send it out to my newsletter list as well. So if you aren't already on my newsletter, then I invite you to sign in. If you just go to drdani.com, you'll see where you can join the newsletter and then I'll send you the latest version of the holiday recipe guide, which is all about avoiding food sensitivities and trying to really minimize processed foods and minimize sugars and to get the healthy nutrients and the enjoyment out of our food, but without the stuff we don't need. And for those of us with MTHFR SNP's we want to be avoiding also sugars, alcohols and folic acid in processed foods because those are just going to bog down our methylation and make for more work for our bodies and less ability to get the most out of our methylfolate. So anyway, I'm glad to chat with you guys tonight. I hope you have a nice Thanksgiving and I'll talk with you more soon.