Alcohol and It’s Effects on your Health and Longevity.

Alcohol and Longevity: What the Research Really Says

For years, we were told that moderate alcohol consumption—especially a glass of red wine—might actually be good for our health. But newer research is challenging that story.

In this episode of the J90 Podcast, Jay takes a research-based look at alcohol and longevity and asks a simple question:

If your goal is to live longer, perform better, and stay healthier as you age, where does alcohol actually fit?

We break down what happens when your body metabolizes alcohol, including the production of acetaldehyde, and examine what the research says about alcohol’s effects on:

• Cancer risk
• Brain health
• Sleep and REM sleep
• Blood pressure and cardiovascular health
• Liver health
• Metabolism and body composition
• Gut health
• Muscle protein synthesis
• Exercise recovery and performance
• Healthy aging and longevity

We also examine why the old idea that moderate drinking protects the heart has become increasingly controversial as researchers account for problems such as healthy-user bias and the so-called “sick quitter” effect.

One of the biggest takeaways from the newer evidence is that alcohol isn’t simply a problem for people who drink heavily. For certain health outcomes—particularly several cancers—even relatively low levels of consumption may carry measurable risk.

That doesn’t mean one drink is equivalent to ten.

Dose matters. Frequency matters. And risk exists on a continuum.

This episode isn’t about judging people who drink or telling everyone they must give up alcohol forever. It’s about giving you accurate information so you can decide whether alcohol is worth the biological tradeoff.

The J90 Challenge

Jay finishes the episode with a simple experiment:

Go alcohol-free for 30 days.

Track your sleep, resting heart rate, HRV, energy, mood, cravings, workouts, recovery, body weight, waist circumference, and overall performance.

Then ask yourself:

What got better when alcohol disappeared?

You don’t need another expensive supplement or complicated longevity protocol to improve your health.

Sometimes one of the most powerful things you can add to your life is something you decide to remove.

Small habits lead to a big life—90 days at a time.

Questions, comments, or ideas for a future episode?

jay@ihnclinic.com

Thank you so much for listening! 
-Jay-Director of Human Performance 

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Transcript

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For decades, we were sold a surprisingly comfortable health message. A glass of red wine with dinner might actually be good for us. Maybe it protected the heart. Maybe moderate drinkers lived longer. And because that message sounded good and fit neatly into our culture, a lot of us stop asking a harder question. What does alcohol actually do inside the human body? That question matters because the scientific conversation has changed. Alcohol is not just empty calories. Ethanol is a psychoactive and toxic substance, and alcohol beverages are established human carcinogens. The World Health Organization now states plainly that there is no completely risk-free form of alcohol consumption, and that even low levels can carry health risk. In the United States, the Surgeon General has highlighted the casual relationship between alcohol and at least seven cancers. And the story goes beyond cancer. Research is forcing us to look harder at alcohol's relationship with sleep, blood pressure, brain structure, liver health, the gut recovery, and ultimately the number of healthy years we get to live. So longevity and health span. So today I'm not going to tell you that having a drink makes you a bad person. Because one thing I want you to remember through this entire episode is this is not a morality episode. It's a longevity episode. So my job is to give you the information clearly enough that you can decide whether the drink in your hand is actually worth the biological price. This is J90 Podcast, where small habits lead to a big life 90 days at a time. And today we're talking about alcohol. So welcome back to J90 Podcast. I'm Jay, Director of Human Performance. One of the core ideas behind J90 is that you do not need a $10,000 longevity program to meaningfully change your health. You need to identify the small behaviors you repeat, understand that those behaviors are doing to your biology, and then make better decisions consistently. Alcohol is a perfect example because it is so normalized that many people barely count on it as a health decision. A beer after work, wine with dinner, a few drinks on a Friday night. None of that automatically means someone has an alcohol problem. But there's a huge difference between asking, do I have a drinking problem? And asking, is the amount I drink helping or hurting the health I say I want to have? Those are not the same question. So for this episode, we're going to stick with the research. And the biggest thing I want you to also remember in this is again, this is not a morality episode. I do not drink. That is a personal decision. Am I against drinking? Not at all. My family has had issues with alcohol in the past, therefore, for multiple generations, and therefore I just chose not to acquire a taste for it. So am I against alcohol? Absolutely not. I'm around people all the time that drink. I don't I don't have an issue with it at all. That's a personal choice. But remember, J90 and my job is to bring you longevity advice that can lead to a longer and a healthier life without a huge price tag. And this is one of the easiest things that I can tell you is to talk to you about alcohol. And the research prior to this was insane that said, pretty much with the picogenols that were in red wine, a glass of red wine actually helped you live longer. But we're going to talk about that in a second. So I want you to remember we're going to stick with the research today. And this is not me lecturing you to not drink. This is me bringing you the research for you to make the right decision. So we're going to look at um why the supposed heart health benefit of moderate drinking has become much less convincing than it was years ago, why cancer risk deserves far more attention, and what alcohol can do to sleep, the brain, cardiovascular health, the liver, metabolism, and the gut. And again, mostly longevity and health span. That's what we really care about. And then I'll give you a simple experiment you can run on yourself. Not forever, not as a punishment, but long enough to see what changes in your body when alcohol is removed from the equation. And one important point before we get into it uh risk is not binary. So saying there's no completely risk-free level does not mean that one drink has the same health impact as 10 drinks. Dose matters, frequency matters, binge drinking definitely matters. Your age, your sex, the medications you're on, medical history, genetics, and overall health matter. The practical takeaway is not to panic, it is that when it comes to alcohol and long-term health, less is generally safer than more. So the first thing I want to talk about is was moderate drinking ever really healthy? And we're going to look at why that research that came out with the a glass of wine a day talked about the uh cardiovascular benefits and really look at some of the holes that were in that research that were never really exposed before. Um, and again, not exposed by me, but exposed by researchers as they've started to do more and more research to verify uh those those findings. So, again, let's get into one of the most persistent ideas in nutritional longevity that we've heard forever, that moderate drinking, especially a glass of red wine, might actually be good for your heart. So, for years, that idea seemed to have a lot of science behind it. We kept hearing about it over and over and over again. Large observational studies often produce what researchers call a J-shaped curve. So if you graft alcohol intake against certain health outcomes, people who drank small, small or moderate amounts sometimes appeared to do better than people who drank heavily, but also better than people who reported drinking nothing at all. So that in itself sounds compelling, and that is what we've heard for 20, 30 years. If moderate drinkers have fewer heart attacks or live longer than non-drinkers, then maybe alcohol is protecting them. But there is a massive issue here. Observational research can show an association without proving what caused it. So think about it this way: think about the people that are inside these groups. For example, someone who has a glass of wine with dinner a few nights a week may also have a higher income, better access to health care, exercise more, eat differently, so have better nutrition, have stronger social connections, and have other lifestyle characteristics that affect their health. So researchers try to adjust for those differences, but statistical adjustment is never perfect. It just doesn't work. And again, a lot of times what has happened when research studies happen is socioeconomic background plays a role in a person's health. And if it does play a role in a person's health, and they're inside any of these groups, then it will affect the outcome. So there's then there's another problem, and it has the great name of the sick quitter problem, and that's what research calls these people. So let me go over that. So imagine a study that puts everyone who currently drinks zero alcohol into one non-drinking group. That group may include who people who have never consumed alcohol in their life, but it may also include former drinkers who stop because they developed liver disease, cancer, heart disease, medication interactions, addiction, or another health problem. Now compare that mixed group with relatively healthy moderate drinkers. Suddenly the moderate drinkers can look healthier, but alcohol may not be the reason. So that's what I'm talking about with the research, and that's what researchers are starting to find in some of these observational studies that were done years ago. This is one of the reasons that newer analysis have become much more skeptical of the idea that a daily drink extends your life. So a major 2023 systemic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA, which is the Journal of American Medical Association, Network Open, looked at 107 coherent studies representing more than 4.8 million participants. After the researchers accounted for important study characteristics and biases, low-volume alcohol consumption was not associated with a statistically significant reduction in all-cause morality compared with lifetime non-drinkers. That is a very different message from a glass of wine a day helps you live longer. So, in other words, to summarize that paragraph there, basically, when they took out the characteristics and biases in the low-volume alcohol consumption group, all of a sudden there was no change in causal, basically death. So now we throw all of those studies out. And then there's another powerful way that scientists have tried to answer the question genetics, which wasn't accounted for at all. Researchers can use naturally occurring genetic variants associated with alcohol consumption as a kind of natural experiment, per se. So an approach that is called Mendelian randomization. So again, it's not perfect, but it helps reduce some of the lifestyle confounding that makes conventional observational studies so difficult to interpret. And Mendelian randomization is being used more and more in research now, and it is helping make the research more realistic and make the outcomes more realistic based on the popul on the general population. In a large 2022 analysis published in JAMA again, Network Open, involving more than 370,000 UK biobank participants, light to moderate alcohol intake was associated with a healthier lifestyle factor. But the genetic analysis did not support the idea that alcohol itself was providing cardiovascular protection. Instead, the researchers found that evidence that alcohol consumption was associated with increased cardiovascular risk, with risks rising more steeply at higher levels of intake. So now I want to be careful here because this is exactly where health information gets turned into clickbait. And you see it more and more now as we're on the internet. I put stuff on my blog, and of course, you want to have a headline that catches people's attention, whether it be on my Stubstack, LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever it is, podcast. You want to have a headline that catches attention so people listen to or read what you're putting out. So again, you have to include all of the facts before you can make those assumptions when you're looking at the studies. So it does not mean that every past study suggesting a cardiovascular benefit was worthless. What it means is the interpretation has changed as researchers have gotten better at identifying confounding and bias and being able to remove that and make the study even better. It also does not mean that one drink and ten drinks carry the same risk. That clearly do not. So remember that frequency and dosage and the amount matters. What it means is that we should stop recommending alcohol as a health intervention. So if you do not drink, there's no convincing longevity reason to start drinking because you heard red wine is good for your heart. And if you do drink, I would not count that glass of wine as part of your cardiovascular health program. You want polyphenols? Eat berries, eat grapes, eat colorful plants. Want to improve cardiovascular health? Exercise. Improve your blood pressure, build muscle, stop smoking, sleep well, improve your metabolic health. There are far better tools available than a glass of ethanol every day. And this is really the bigger J90 lesson. We have to be willing to update our beliefs when better evidence arrives. Health evidence should not become part of our identity. If the evidence changes, our recommendations should change with it. Those seven pillars that we talk about, those seven pillars of longevity that I've talked about before, change all the time on recommendations based on what new research is and how good that research is. Some research research that's out there, you have to look at who paid for it. You have to look at where it was done. Is there a company behind it that benefits from the research turning out well? So there's more bias. And again, look at the factors that we just talked about and who's in what groups. So, based on that, if there's good research out, then typically it'll be validated by another research study. And once it's validated by another research study, that's when I start to say, okay, let's put that into a protocol of longevity and health span. We have to be willing again to update our beliefs when better evidence/slash research arrives. Health advice should not become part of our identity again. If the evidence changes, our recommendations should change with it, as mine always do. For decades, moderate alcohol consumption enjoyed a health halo. Today that halo is looking a lot less convincing. But even if the supposed health benefit disappears, that's only half the story. Because there is one area where the evidence around alcohol is much harder to dismiss, and where even relatively small amounts deserve our attention. And that is cancer. And that is where we're going next. So alcohol and cancer, the risk most people don't even pay attention to with alcohol anymore, because once it was seen that good to have one drink a day for your health, people threw originally that was one drink a day helps your cardiovascular health. That became so general that one drink a day became uh it one drink a day helps your overall health. And all of a sudden, nobody paid attention to any of the research on alcohol. But more and more research is coming out on alcohol and longevity and health span, is more money is being put into longevity and health span research. So now we need to pay attention to alcohol and its relationship to cancer. And like I said earlier, the World Health Organization is even spending money on its direct relation to cancer. And there's at least seven cancers that have some fairly strong relationship to cancer. So we get what may be the most important part of this episode, and this is the alcohol and cancer. So if I stop ten people on the street and ask them what alcohol can do to the body, I think most would mention the liver. Some would mention addiction, maybe somebody would mention drunk driving or high blood pressure. But cancer, the connection is still dramatically underappreciated. If you ask most people on the street uh about cancer, the first thing that somebody is gonna say, probably nine out of ten people, and I've never done this, so I don't know, but I just did conversations with clients and patients in the past, people are gonna associate smoking with the cancer. But alcohols typically never brought up in that conversation. So again, the connection is still very dramatically underappreciated. And this is not fringe science. Alcoholic beverages are classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a group one carcinogen, meaning there is sufficient evidence that they cause cancer in humans. So they're not a group two, group three, they are a group one, meaning it is strong, very strong, and very sufficient evidence that they cause cancer in humans. So that classification puts alcohol in the highest evidence category for carcinogenicity. And I want to clarify something because this gets misunderstood all the time. Being in the same classification category as another carcinogen does not mean every carcinogen carries the same magnitude of risk. The category tells us how confident scientists are that the exposure can cause cancer, not that every exposure is equally dangerous. So the U.S. surgeon's general advisory on alcohol and cancer highlighted a causal relationship between alcohol and consumption and at least seven cancers. Cancers of the mouth, throat, voice box, esophagus, liver, colorectum, plus breast cancer in women. Worldwide, roughly 741,000 new cancer cases in 2020 were attributed to alcohol consumption. So three-quarters of a million cancer cases in 2020 were attributable to alcohol consumption alone. That's an astounding number. That should change the way we talk about drinking. It should make us stop and say, okay, this takes an up, this I should take another look at this. So why does alcohol cause cancer? Remember acetyl aldehyde that we talked about, well, we didn't really talk about it, but we talked about the observational studies with alcohol. When your body metabolizes ethanol, it produces acetyl aldehyde. Both ethanol and alcoholic beverages and acetylaldehyde are associated with drinking, have been classified as carcinogens to humans. Acetyl allohyde can damage DNA. Alcohol metabolism can also increase oxidative stress, which causes cancer, interfere with biological processes involved in DNA repair, and folate metabolism, and influence hormone levels. And breast tissue, one proposed pathway involves increase and increases in estrogen, which can promote the growth of certain hormone-sensitive breast cancers. So what it's saying is as you break alcohol down, which is essentially ethanol when we drink it, and it breaks it down to acetylaldehyde, it affects DNA, it affects hormone levels, which when we're younger is one thing, but as we get older, hormone levels fluctuate a large amount anyway, and we need to preserve all the hormone balance we can as we get older. But again, this is super important for longevity and health span. And now there's a link that alcohol could possibly increase estrogen, which can promote the growth of certain hormone-sensitive breast cancers. This is also the especially dangerous interaction. There's also an especially dangerous interaction between alcohol and tobacco. Alcohol can make tissues of the mouth and throat more vulnerable to carcinogens from tobacco, which helps explain why combining heavy drinking and smoking can be particularly destructive when the combination happens. But here's the part I really want you to hear. You do not have to be an alcoholic for alcohol to affect cancer risk. And I think that is going to be one of the biggest takeaways from this is again, small amounts of alcohol can make changes. So when we started in the beginning, we talked about the amount, the frequency, all of those things on top of your overall health. So someone who is super healthy, one drink on occasion is not going to affect them the same way as a person who is very unhealthy that has one drink occasionally. So the risk is dose-dependent. Generally, the more alcohol you consume over time, the greater the risk. But some alcohol-related cancer risk appears even at relatively low levels of consumption. So the World Health Organization states that there is no established safe level of alcohol consumption when we are specifically talking about cancer risk. That does not mean that one glass of wine gives you cancer. It means science cannot identify a threshold below which cancer risk becomes zero. There are two completely different, those are two completely different statements. And breast cancer is one of the clearest examples of why that distinction matters. So WHO, which is the World Health Organization, from now on, that's I'll say WHO, and the IARC have concluded that even relatively low alcoholic consumption can increase breast cancer risk. Across the WHO European region, almost one-third of alcohol-attributable breast cancers in 2020 were associated with consumption of no more than one or two alcoholic drinks per day. So globally, WHO estimates that one in 20 breast cancers is attributed to alcohol. So one in 20. Think about how differently we treat other modifiable cancer risk. We talk about sunscreen and skin cancer, we talk about cigarettes and lung cancer. We talk about screening diet, obesity, physical activity, and family history. Yet someone can drink wine every evening for decades and never have been told that alcohol itself is a recognized cause of breast cancer. That is an information problem. And it's why I think the conversation needs to change from is drinking socially acceptable to what level of risk am I willing to accept to drink socially? Those are personal decisions again. It's not a morality issue. If someone understands the evidence and says, I enjoy two beers on Saturday, I'm willing to accept whatever small additional risk comes with that, that is an informed adult making an informed decision. What I have a problem with is someone drinking two glasses of wine every night because they genuinely believe they are protecting their heart. That person has not been given the whole picture. That's what I want this episode to understand, you to understand. And remember, cancer risk is cumulative. Your biology does not reset every Monday morning. The pattern repeated over years and decades matters. Again, we talk about it with longevity and health span. What is the main premise of J90? Small habits lead to a big life 90 days at a time. Small, consistent habits over time. Well, that can cause positive influence and positive results. But guess what else it can do if you do a habit that is detrimental to your health consistently over time? A small habit that can be detrimental as well. So cancer risk is cumulative. Your biology does not again reset every Monday morning. The pattern repeated over years and decades makes a difference. There are some encouraging news here too. Reducing alcohol intake can reduce exposure to this carcinogen. And the IARC has concluded that reduction or cessation can lower risk for some alcohol-related cancers. For oral and esophageal cancers, evidence supports risk reduction after stopping or reducing alcohol. Although the strength of evidence varies by cancer type and risk can take years to decline. So this is not about regretting what you did 20 years ago. J90, again, and what we're talking about today is about what you do next. You cannot change yesterday's drinks. You cannot change tonight's. Oh, you cannot change yesterday's drinks, but you can change tonight's drinks. And when you zoom out and think about longevity, that is incredibly empowering. So forget about what happened before. Focus on what we're doing next to increase longevity and health. Every drink you decide to do, you do not need is one less exposure. Every alcohol free day is another small decision moving in the direction you say you want to go. Again, small habits, big life. Now, cancer alone gives us a legitimate reason to rethink alcohol, but alcohol does not operate in one isolated biological lane. It affects the organ that controls nearly everything you do, your brain. It changes your sleep architecture. It can influence blood pressure and cardiovascular function. It affects the liver, metabolism, and potentially the whole ecosystem that's living inside your gut as well. So let's talk about next, let's connect some of the dots and see what it does with the whole body as a the body as a whole. And this is where even people who are not worried about cancer may start noticing that alcohol is costing them something right now, as far as health goes, not 30 years from now. So, what does alcohol do to your brain, your sleep, heart, liver, metabolism, your gut? So, cancer is a long-term game that a lot of people never hear about until they get it or they pass away from something else. Or a family member gets it and they're affected by it. But alcohol also affects you, may be able to see, feel, and measure much sooner. Let's start with the brain. Alcohol is one of the few substances that crosses the blood-brain barrier and changes neurotransmission. That is why it can make you feel relaxed, less inhibited, slower to react, less coordinated. But the question for longevity podcast is not simply what happens while you're buzzed, it is what repeated exposure may mean for the brain over time. One of the most discussed studies from the UK Biobank, researchers analyzed brain imaging for more than 36,000 generally healthy middle-aged and older adults. Alcohol intake was negatively associated with the global brain volume, regional gray matter volume, and measures of white matter microstructure. So basically, the brain was larger and healthier in individuals that didn't have alcohol intake. And importantly, those negative associations were already detectable among people averaging roughly one to two alcohol units per day with stronger associations as intake increased. Now, scientific guardrail here to take a look. This was an observational cross-sectional. So remember, we talked about observational studies before. So if they don't take biases out, then they become non-substantial. So it cannot prove that alcohol caused every structural difference in the brain. But when I'm thinking about protecting my brain for the next 20 or 30 years, I do not look at that finding and think, great, alcohol is probably helping. There's nothing in that study, even when you take out before you take out biases, that says there's a chance that alcohol is actually helping the brain. I look at it and ask a much simpler question. Why would I intentionally add something that may work against the brain? I am trying to preserve. Then you look at sleep, which obviously is brain affected as well. This is where alcohol fools people. A drink can make you sleepy, we all know that. It can shorten the amount of time it takes some people to fall asleep, and because of that, people conclude that alcohol helps them sleep. But sedation is not the same thing as restorative sleep. A systemic review and meta-analysis published in sleep medicine reviews examined 27 studies in healthy adults. Alcohol changed sleep architecture, including delaying REM sleep and reducing REM duration. The researchers found that REM disruption, even at lower doses, around two standard drinks or less, depending on the body size, and the disruption became worse as the dose increased. So, in other words, again, this comes back to how much and how much of an effect it has, but even at one or two drinks, it affected your REM sleep, which is when your body repairs itself and restores itself for the next day. So you may fall asleep faster and still get worse sleep. And if you wear a whoop or ring, Apple Watch, or another tracker, this may not be theoretical. Some people can watch what happens to their overnight physiology after drinking. Sleep quality can deteriorate, resting heart rate can rise, and recovery can look worse. So I notice it myself with caffeine and sugar. If I have caffeine and sugar later in the day, I may feel like I sleep, but my recovery number is bad in that morning, my HRV is lower, and my resting heart rate is higher. So you can do the same thing with alcohol. So a tracker is not a medical device, again, but in one bad recovery score does not prove that alcohol, again, caused everything that happened that night. But run the experiment repeatedly, and your own pattern can become pretty difficult to ignore. Now think about what poor sleep touches appetite regulation, glucose control, mood, cognition, training recovery, blood pressure, and decision making the next day. That glass of wine does not necessarily end when the glass is empty. So now let's talk blood pressure and cardiovascular system. Remember, we talked about the old assumption that moderate alcohol is protecting the heart has become much harder to defend. A 2023 dose-responde meta-analysis in the Journal of Hypertension looked at longevity, longitudinal cohort studies, and found that systolic blood pressure increased over time with increased alcohol intake. So, importantly, the analysis did not identify a clear threshold where alcohol consumption had no association with higher systolic pressure. So, in other words, this study found, after looking at all these multiple studies, that any amount of alcohol had a direct relationship to increasing blood pressure, systolic blood pressure, which is your top number of your blood pressure. The individual change may sound small, but blood pressure is one of the biggest modifiable drivers of cardiovascular disease. Small differences repeated across years and across millions of people matter. At higher levels, alcohol is associated with hypertension, erythemias, including atrial fibrillation, cardiomyopathy, and stroke risk. So again, alcohol is not something I would prescribe for cardiovascular health. Then we have the organ everybody already associates with drinking, and what is that? The liver. And I'll tell you why. Your liver has to prioritize alcohol metabolism because ethanol cannot simply be stored away for later, like glycogen or body fat. As we talked about earlier, metabolizing alcohol changes the liver's redox state, the NADH to NAD plus balance. So those two things are again, we didn't talk about in detail, but we talked about when the alcohol reduces itself and breaks itself down. What we're talking about is when alcohol changes this NADH to NAD plus balance and then can shift metabolism toward fat accumulation. There is one pathway through which repeated alcohol exposure can contribute to fatty liver. With enough exposure and enough individual susceptibility, the spectrum can progress through fat accumulation to inflammation, fibrosis, cirrhosis, and in some people liver cancer. Not everybody who drinks develops liver disease. Genetics, obesity, metabolic health, sex, drinking pattern, and total exposure all influence risk. And I've seen in my own family people with fully broken liver and liver disease fall out, stop drinking for a short period of time and rehab, and their liver disease number goes down exponentially. So again, it shows that stopping can actually make a big difference. So, but here's an important point for the modern world alcohol and poor metabolic health can be a nasty combination. So if somebody already has visceral fat, has insulin resistance, high triglycerides, or fatty liver related to metabolic dysfunction, adding significant alcohol exposure is not exactly giving the liver a vacation. And it sure is heck not help helping your liver function and keep you healthy and living longer and living healthier. And alcohol carries calories. About seven calories per gram of ethanol without providing the protein, fiber, or micronutrient density we want from most of our calories. Then add what often happens around drinking. The late-night pizza, the wings, the chips, the dessert, the decision to skip the morning workout because you slept badly. The metabolic cost of drinking is not always contained inside the drink itself. It can alter the next several decisions, too. And let's finally touch on the gut, which we're kind of leading to here with the liver and the uh metabolism. This is an exciting area of research that is getting more and more dollars thrown at it and more and more research studies thrown at it, but I want to be precise because it's easy to overstate how important your microbiome science is. In people with alcohol use disorder and alcohol-associated liver disease, clinical research frequently finds changes in the gut microbiome and evidence of impaired intestinal barrier function. Alcohol and its metabolites can influence gut microbiomes, inflammation, and intestinal permeability, potentially contributing to the gut liver axis involved in alcohol-related diseases. So, what that means in English, for those of you that didn't understand, is drinking even small amounts of alcohol, especially over time, messes with your stomach. And I know that anybody that has drank too much at night in college or whenever, um, a lot of times your gut is all over the place and you're in the bathroom the next day or that night. And that again is affecting your microbiome and your gut. And the more you do even small amounts over time, it kills good bacteria and lets bad bacteria flourish, which causes all kinds of gut issues. But much of the strongest human evidence comes from people with heavy alcohol exposure or established disease. We should not automatically take findings from severe alcohol use disorder and claim that one Saturday night beer produces the same microbiome changes. So again, dose and frequency matters. And if we did that, it would lead to horrible science. What we can say is that the gut, liver, immune system, and alcohol metabolism are definitely connected. And heavy chronic exposure clearly can disrupt that system. Now, if you put all that together and we look at brain structure, sleep architecture, blood pressure, cardiovascular risk, liver fat and liver injury, metabolism carry calories and downstream food calories, gut health. This is why I think we framed alcohol incorrectly for years. And the research is showing it over and over again. We ask, how much can I safely get away with? For longevity, I think the better question is what does this add to my life? And what is it costing me if I do have it? Maybe you genuinely love a great glass of wine with your spouse on an anniversary, fine, or out to dinner or a beer on a Saturday night watching football, fine. Health is not about becoming a robot. But if you're drinking automatically because it's 6 p.m., because everybody else is drinking, because you are stressed, or because you still think two glasses every night are improving your health, that deserves another look and another thought. Because the same person who spends hundreds of dollars on supplements, tracks their HRV and resting heart rate, buys organic food, works out five days a week, and worries about biological age, can erase some of that effort with a habit they have never even seriously questioned. And that is exactly the kind of habit that J90 is built to challenge. Next, I want to bring this directly into performance and healthy aging. So let's talk about muscle recovery, body composition, and the question that matters most. If you want to be stronger, sharper, and harder to kill as you age, what does alcohol where does actu alcohol actually fit? So let's take a person who uh let's take this personal for anybody who trains. If you're lifting weights, trying to lose weight, improve your VO2 max, preserve muscle as you age, recover faster, or simply wake up with enough energy to perform at a high level. Alcohol deserves to be evaluated as part of that equation because healthy aging is not just about avoiding disease, it's about maintaining capacity. Can you carry groceries at 70? Get off the floor without help, hike with your family, keep your balance, maintain muscle strength and cardiovascular fitness and cognitive function. Those are health span questions, and muscle is one of the most revaluable pieces of biological infrastructure you can build as you age. And we've talked about that in previous podcasts, and we'll talk about it again, I guarantee you. Resistance training stimulates muscle protein synthesis. You train, you create a stimulus, and then the adaptation happens during recovery. Alcohol can interfere with that process, particularly at higher doses. One controlled human study published in PLOS 1 looked at alcohol consumed after strenuous exercise. Participants received a large alcohol dose, about 1.5 grams per kilogram of body mass, along with either protein or carbohydrate. Muscle protein synthesis was reduced compared with protein alone, even when protein was consumed with the alcohol. Now, again, that was a very heavy dose. It would be irresponsible to take that study and tell you that one beer after mowing the lawn destroys your gains. It doesn't show that, and it would be ridiculous to think that. What it does show is that substantial alcohol exposure during a recovery window can interfere with anabolic response we are trying to create through our training and recovery. And that makes intuitive sense because when you combine it with everything else we've discussed and what you're trying to do in training, think about it. If alcohol disrupts your sleep, changes hydration, adds calories, impairs judgment, and larger doses directly interfere with muscle protein synthesis. Why would we expect to improve recovery? Then there's the performance itself piece of the up piece of the pie. Acute alcohol use can impair reaction time, coordination, balance, and judgment. The next day effects can matter too, especially after heavier drinking, because poor sleep, dehydration, gastrointestinal symptoms, and hangover are not exactly ingredients for a great training session. There's another part of this that gets overlooked too. Consistency. Your body does not know what your workout plan says on paper, it knows what you actually do. If Friday night drinking means Saturday morning training disappears, that is part of the physiological cost of Friday night drinking. If alcohol makes you sleep poorly and you train at 70% the next day, that counts. If two drinks become four and four drinks become late night food, the late night food becomes a skipped workout, that entire chain belongs to in the calculation. This is why I do not like looking at health behaviors in isolation. We live in systems and systems create life. Systems create lifespan and systems create health span. One habit changes the probability of the next habit. Now let's talk about body composition. Alcohol contains about seven calories per gram. And yes, there are the low calorie options out there as well. But in general, alcohol contains about seven calories per gram. These calories can add up quickly, especially if because liquid calories are easy to consume without producing the same fullness you might get from a high protein, high fiber meal, and alcohol can lower inhibition around food. Very few people finish their third drink and suddenly become passionate about grilled chicken and broccoli. You know what happens. Pizza sounds amazing, fries sound amazing, dessert sounds amazing. Then you wake up tired, your workout looks less attractive, and the cycle continues. So when someone tells me I eat perfectly all week, I still cannot lose the weight. One of the questions worth asking is what happens Friday through Sunday? You do not need to label yourself an alcoholic to recognize that alcohol may be sabotaging your end goal. And this becomes increasingly important as we age. As we get older, preserving skeletal muscle, cardiorespiratory fitness, metabolic health, sleep quality, cognitive function, those all become very important, not less important as we age. The margin for repeatedly working against those systems gets smaller and smaller and smaller the older we get. And that brings us back to again the J90 philosophy. I'm not asking you to live perfectly. I'm asking you to stop spending enormous amounts of effort trying to optimize the small things while ignoring a big lever sitting right in front of you that you keep wanting to pull. People will spend hundreds of dollars on a supplement because it might improve recovery by a few percent. They'll buy a sleep tracker, they'll buy take magnesium, they'll do cold plunge, they will optimize their protein intake, they will debate the perfect training split, and then they will drink three or four nights a week without ever asking what that habit is doing to the same outcomes they are trying so hard to improve. It just doesn't make sense. Before you add another supplement, another gadget, or another complicated longevity protocol, remove the obvious friction. This is one of the cheapest health interventions available. And I want to emphasize. Something else. You do not have to decide today that you will never drink alcohol again, or that you have the all-or-nothing think thinking stops a lot of people from experimenting. Instead, treat yourself like it, like the N in one of the experiments. What happens if you remove alcohol for 30 days? Track your sleep, track your resting heart rate, track your HRV if you use it, track your morning energy, track your workouts, track your cravings, track your body weight and waist circumference if those matter to you. But pay attention to your mood, focus, productivity. Then after 30 days, look at the data. Maybe the difference is dramatic. Maybe it's modest. Maybe you decide an occasional drink is worth the trade-off. But now you're making that decision with your eyes open and all the information that you should have to make that decision. And that is where we're going to go next. I'm going to give you my perspective, my prescription for turning everything we have talked about today into a simple practical experiment. No guilt, no preaching, no perfection. Just 30 days, a few measurements, and a chance to find out what your body does when alcohol gets out of the way. All right. So we've covered a ton today as far as research goes. Now let's talk about what we do to see how it affects us individually. So again, let's turn to something we can actually use. This is my prescription for this episode, the J90 prescription for this episode, and it's really deliberately simple. Give me 30 days without alcohol. Not because I'm telling you that you can never have another drink, not because drinking makes you a bad person, and not because 30 alcohol-free days magically erases 20 years of having alcohol four days a week. Do it because 30 days is long enough to interrupt an automatic habit and give you a chance to collect some information about yourself and how you feel. This is an experiment. Before day one, take a baseline. For the next few mornings, write down five things: how well you slept, your morning energy, your mood, your cravings, and how you recovered, how recovered you feel. Again, if you wear a tracker, record your average resting heart rate, your HRV, and your sleep data. If body composition is one of your goals, then record your body weight and waste circumference too. If performance matters to you, record a few basic training numbers. Don't turn this into a laboratory and make it so hard that you won't do it. We're looking for patterns again, not perfection. Then start day one. For 30 days, remove alcohol. And here's the important part. Do not just remove the drink, replace the ritual. If your habit is pouring wine at 6 30 every evening, the clock itself may trigger, become a trigger. So build a replacement. Sparkling water with lime, a non-alcoholic drink if that works for you. Tea, for example, a walk after dinner, which we all know is healthy, healthy anyway, a 10-minute, 10 to 15 minute walk after dinner, 10 minutes outside, read, train, call somebody, whatever fits your life, but replace that trigger. The replacement matters because many habits are not simply about the substance, they are about the cue, the ritual, and the reward. And if you're clients of mine, you understand we've talked about this. Then pay attention to what happens. During week one, notice when you actually want alcohol. Is it stress? Is it boredom? Social pressure? Habit? Reward? Are you drinking because you generally enjoy the experience or because your brain has learned that Friday night equals alcohol or after a stressful day equals alcohol? That information is incredibly valuable. Now, during weeks two and three, look for trends. How are you sleeping? How do you feel when you wake up? What is happening with your resting heart rate? Your HRV, your workouts, your appetite, your late night eating, your productivity, your mood. So remember that your HRV and your resting heart rate aren't going to change overnight. Probably not going to change at all your first week. They may change towards the end of the first week, but by weeks two and three, you should be able to see some change. And again, none of these measures is perfect. HRV can change because of training, illness, stress, sleep, hydration, and a dozen other variables. So we're looking at the whole picture. And then on day 30, compare yourself with day one and ask one question. What got better when alcohol disappeared? If the answer is nothing, that's useful information. If your sleep improved, your mornings got easier, you lost weight, your training improved, your resting heart rate came down, you stopped eating junk or at night, or you feel mentally sharper. That is useful information as well. Now you get to decide what happens on day 31. Maybe you decide alcohol is no longer worth it. Maybe you decide you want it only for social special occasions. Maybe you go from drinking four nights a week to one. Maybe you decide to on one drink when you do drink instead of three. The goal is not for me to make that decision for you. The goal is to stop making the decision unconsciously without the information you should have. And one safety point matters here. If you drink heavily every day, have had withdrawal symptoms before, need alcohol to feel normal, or think you may be physically dependent on alcohol, do not suddenly stop because you heard this podcast. Alcohol withdrawal can be dangerous and in severe cases life-threatening. Talk with a physician or qualified addiction professional about how to stop safely. For everyone else, this 30-day experiments is one of the simplest health experiments you can run. It costs almost nothing, you do not need a prescription, you do not need another supplement, and you do not need a $10,000 longevity clinic. You need 30 days and the willingness to pay attention. Because J90 has never been about perfection. It's about finding the small habits that quietly determine the direction of your life. Small habits lead to big life 90 days at a time. And sometimes the most powerful thing you can add to your health is something you finally decide to remove. So, where does all of this leave us? For a long time, alcohol occupied a strange place in health culture. We knew too much could hurt us, but we also heard that a little might actually be good for us. The newer evidence makes that story much harder to defend. Alcohol is a known human carcinogen. It is casually linked with multiple cancers. It can disrupt sleep architecture. Higher exposure can interfere with recovery in muscle protein synthesis. It affects the liver, the cardiovascular system, and the brain. And the supposed longevity advantage of modern drinking becomes far less convincing when researchers do a better job accounting for differences between drinkers and non-drinkers. That does not mean you need to be afraid of alcohol. It means you should respect what it is and you should make the decision with accurate information. If you choose to drink occasionally because you enjoy it, understand the trade-off. If you decide the trade-off is not worth it, that's fine too. But do not drink because you believe alcohol is a longevity supplement. It is not. And please remember what I said throughout this episode. Dose matters. Drinking one glass of wine once a month is not a biologically equivalent to drinking a bottle every night. Risk exists on a continuum. The goal here is not fear, the goal is awareness. So here's your J90 challenge, which we talked about. Give yourself 30 alcohol-free days. Don't obsess over it. Do not make it your entire personality. Just collect the data, see how you sleep, see how the recovery goes, see how you train, see how you think, see how you feel when Monday morning is no longer recovering from Saturday night. And at the end of those 30 days, make your own decision. That is taking ownership of your health. That is what taking ownership of your health looks like. You don't need perfect genetics. You don't need a perfect diet. You do not need to spend $10,000 chasing longevity. You need to start identifying the small decisions you repeat every single day because those decisions eventually become your biology. That is the entire idea behind J90. Small habits, big life, 90 days at a time. If this episode made you think differently about alcohol, send it to someone who needs to hear it. Not to judge them, not to preach to them, just to give them the information and let them make their own decision. And if you take the 30 day challenge, pay attention to what happens and changes. You might learn more about your body in 30 days than you expected. I'm Jay and this is Jay90. Build the habits today that give you more life tomorrow. I'll see you on the next episode.