Alcohol and Your Life

Alcohol is a depressant, meaning it can cause extreme sadness and a whole host of emotions. There are a large amount of negative side effects that alcohol has on the body, as well as life in general. 

Alcohol’s effects on the body change over time. Initially, alcohol really does produce the feeling of relaxation and happiness, seemingly the reason why many people drink. You will be very outgoing and have more confidence in yourself, but it catches up with you after awhile. Excessive drinking can lead to blurred vision and coordination problems. The cell membranes in our bodies are very permeable to alcohol, so it gets into virtually every area of the body when it is consumed. Very heavy drinking can cause a person to become unconscious and lead to alcohol poisoning, a state where your body begins shutting down and organs stop working due to the alcohol, or even death. Another common cause of death in drunken persons is asphyxiation. It happens when a person is vomiting due to excessive consumption of alcohol and chokes to death on the vomit. 

Alcoholism, an addiction to alcohol, is obviously a major health problem that affects many people in this country. Many of us may know someone that is an alcoholic and if not, we’ve surely heard stories in health class about those who are. Longtime use of alcohol is where one can run into many more major health problems. It can cause cancer in the digestive system, esophagus, the pharynx, larynx, and the liver. The liver contains special enzymes which break down the alcohol in fats, carbon dioxide, and water. Fat deposits are what cause the “beer belly” that everyone has heard about. In the body of a chronic drinker, fatty acids build up as plaques around the liver capillaries, which kills these cells. In time, the drinker could develop cirrhosis, where the liver experiences excessive scarring from the alcohol abuse and simply cannot filter out the alcohol anymore. This disease can lead to liver cancer or failure.