Vital Wellness

Aside from a thiamin deficiency, excessive drinking can also cause a defi­ciency of vitamin B6, a nutrient needed for formation of red blood cells as well as reactions involved in normal cell functions.

Pyridoxine, or vitamin B6, is more rapidly eliminated from the body during heavy drinking, over 50 percent of those who drink excessively seem to have defi­ciencies. Eating a well-balanced diet that includes 1.3 milligrams of vitamin B6 can correct the problem, but only if no further alcohol is ever consumed. Good food sources of pyridoxine include meat, fish, poultry, or fortified cereals. Read the rest of this entry »

Research suggests that long-term alcohol use causes the liver to excrete vita­min A and impairs the body’s ability to convert

Vitamin A Food Source

beta-carotene to vitamin A.

So it should come as no surprise that people with cirrhosis of the liver, a disease commonly caused by chronic alcohol use, are frequently deficient in vitamin A. Vitamin A plays an important part in helping you to reproduce, to grow new cells, to fight infection, and, because of its important role in the retina, to see at night. Read the rest of this entry »

Alcohol Abuse In Pregnacy

Although alcohol devastates the body both directly as a toxin and indirectly through nutrient loss, scientists suspect that it may also affect the body’s natural antioxidant defenses. Antioxidants are substances that protect your body’s healthy molecules against damage by unstable molecules called free radicals. Heavy alcohol use not only increases the production of free radicals, but it also depletes stores of antioxidants, like vitamins C and E. That means that while those nasty rogue molecules are increasing exponentially, the natural warriors needed to fight them off are decreasing rapidly. This imbal­ance is called “oxidative stress.” Read the rest of this entry »

You probably know someone with a drinking problem. In fact, maybe that person is you.

Alcoholic Problem

Problems with alcohol are fairly common in the United States. Two- thirds of all Americans drink and sixty percent are light to moderate drinkers, but up to 10 percent drink excessively.

The lights to moderate drinkers are probably in pretty good health, because is safe and may be beneficial, since it lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease. But excessive alcohol consumption is another story. Excessive drinking on a daily basis—more than three drinks for a woman and more than six for a man—increases your risk of cancer and can damage the liver, pancreas, heart, and brain, and also increases the risk of breast cancer in women, says doctor. It can cause vitamin deficiencies resulting in anemia, memory loss, osteoporosis, and night blindness. Although rare in this country, when scurvy due to vitamin C deficiency and pellagra due to niacin deficiency do occur, it’s usually in alcoholics. Read the rest of this entry »

Although the body produces natural antioxidants to neutralize free radical damage, it doesn’t produce enough to handle the free

Body Cell

radical bombard­ment generated by the modern world. Your body’s natural antioxidant sys­tems were simply not designed to handle rooms full of cigarette smoke, a diet loaded with fat and constant exposure to new and more virulent viruses.

This may change once scientists learn how to alter our genes so that we produce more natural antioxidants. But in the meantime, we do have another option: enhancing our natural antioxidants with synthetic antioxidants—in a word, supplements. Read the rest of this entry »