Very high alcohol intake kills mitochondria....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 5-29-2014

I.  Why losing those mitochondria is so harmful to you and your health:           

1.  Very high alcohol intake and binge drinking also INCREASE heart disease and heart attack rates.

Low moderate drinking, particularly of red wine, lowers heart disease and heart attack rates and even death rates.  As long as it doesn’t lead to harmful car or other accidents even heavier moderate drinking does the same.

But drinking twice that much over a long time or binge drinking let alone binge drinking often, has the reverse effect!

For men, a high intake of alcohol is two or more drinks in a single day and/or 14 or more per week or 30 or more per month.  Women vary some but tend to be able to handle from 50% to 80% as much alcohol. 

Binge drinking for men is five or more drinks in a day and for women it’s three or four or more drinks in a day depending on the woman.

2.  Recent research has found that such very heavy drinking kills mitochondria.  That link from Medical News Today is below.

3.  That’s very bad news indeed because it’s extremely desirable to keep all your mitochondria -- or even grow new ones -- and to keep the mitochondria you have healthy and fully functional.

Your mitochondria are quite literally the power and energy providers inside each of your cells

How much energy you have; how fast you can move; how youthful you are and act depend directly on having enough mitochondria in all your cells.  It’s also essential they be in good health.

Harming mitochondria causes muscle weakness -- including heart failure where your heart begins to not pump well enough to send blood to you or clear the blood from its chambers completely when it pumps. 

So harming mitochondria speeds aging & lowers perceived energy and real energy in your body's cells.  It also contributes to obesity by reducing metabolism and lowering muscle mass.  And, it contributes to insulin resistance and is also a direct contributing cause of sleep apnea!

The calories in high alcohol intake also tend to cause obesity.

II. What to do about it:

So:

1.  Have one or one and a half drinks or less most days and very rarely have two or more in a single day.  And if you can, have at least one day a week with no or only a half or one drink. Work to average less than 10 drinks a week and less than 40 a month.

(The ideal is to drink between 3 and 8 drinks a week with 1 & a half the most in any one day.)

2.  Do NOT take statin drugs.  They too harm mitochondria. 

(It’s not at all well known; but eating 6 or more servings a day of vegetables and following the methods in our post two weeks ago, 5-15-2014, on increasing your HDL and lowering your LDL lower death rates from heart attacks and your overall death rate. 

One study found eating 6 or more servings a day of vegetables cut overall death rates by 42% and by about 24 % from heart attacks.  The exercise that boosts your HDL was recently found to cut your overall death rate by 48% -- nearly by half!

Statin drugs do NOT cut your risk of death as the research found that they produce ZERO drop in overall death rates.  Worse, 9 % of the people who take statins develop type 2 diabetes – far more than prevent nonfatal heart attacks!

That means you can get MUCH better protection from heart attacks and heart disease without statins and their proven harm to your mitochondria.)

3.  AND, if you can, take the supplements ubiquinol and PQQ. 

Ubiquinol helps keep your mitochondria healthy and/or boosts their energy output. 

(In one study on mice those fed ubiquinol aged less and even became more youthful.  They moved far better and even LOOKED younger. 

Ubiquinol is the form of  CoQ10 that your body actually uses to power your mitochondria and is a MUCH more effective  supplement.)

PQQ either speeds or catalyzes mitochondria repair or grows new ones as taking it increases the number of healthy mitochondria you have! 

(This is a new supplement studied as doing this at UC, Davis.  PQQ is also a natural compound; and there is some in kiwifruit.)

4.  Do some vigorous exercise most days of every week even if the total amount per day is 4 to 20 minutes a day. 

It looks quite likely that some of the anti-aging and disease prevention effect of such exercise is that the mitochondria of your muscles and heart and possibly the rest of you is because doing so also gives your mitochondria beneficial exercise.

Here’s the link to the study showing that heavy alcohol intake kills mitochondria:

http://mnt.to/l/4mSZ

Muscle weakness is a common symptom of both long-time alcoholics and patients

with mitochondrial disease. Now researchers have found a common link:

mitochondria that are unable to self-repair.