Remember these four things to avoid when drinking alcohol during holidays and follow the three principles of a reasonable diet.
During holidays, many adult men inevitably gather for meals and drink alcohol. Many suffer health problems due to excessive drinking, and their friends and family also suffer as a result. Here are four pieces of advice for your reference:
1. Do not drink alcohol on an empty stomach. Drinking alcohol on an empty stomach can cause ethanol to directly irritate the gastric mucosa, easily leading to acute gastritis, gastric bleeding, peptic ulcers, and other diseases. Because ethanol is rapidly and massively absorbed into the bloodstream when drinking on an empty stomach, it affects brain function and causes acute alcohol poisoning, which is why we know that it is easy to get drunk on an empty stomach. Over time, this can lead to chronic alcohol poisoning.
2. Do not mix baijiu (Chinese liquor) with soda. When baijiu and soda are mixed, the ethanol will spread quickly throughout the body with the help of the gas in the soda, and the large amount of carbon dioxide will cause hypoxia, which will damage the stomach, intestines, liver and cardiovascular system.
3. Do not eat carrots with alcohol. The abundant beta-carotene in carrots is mainly broken down and metabolized in the human liver. If it enters the body with ethanol, it will increase the workload of the liver in a short period of time, leading to liver disease.
4. Do not drink excessively. To quote an advertising slogan, "What harm is there in drinking if you don't drink in moderation?" The diseases caused by excessive drinking are probably already well known to people, the most common of which are alcohol poisoning and alcoholic liver disease.
Eating correctly is not an easy task; there are many scientific principles involved. Especially during festivals, such as around the Spring Festival, improper eating can harm your health. To enjoy the holidays healthily and happily, a balanced diet is essential.
1. Control your intake. During holidays, people tend to eat more snacks and desserts, so it's important to reduce your intake at regular meals to avoid overnutrition, especially when activity levels are low and energy expenditure is reduced for several consecutive days. Eating too much at once can also trigger acute pancreatitis and "delicious food syndrome." The former is characterized by severe abdominal pain accompanied by fever, nausea, and vomiting; the latter often presents with dizziness, palpitations, jaw tremors, and numbness in the upper limbs.
2. Maintain a balanced diet with both meat and vegetables. Each meal should include both. If you eat too much meat at one meal, eat more vegetables at the next to help regulate your body and achieve nutritional balance. Eating too much meat can make the body's internal environment acidic, interfering with normal metabolism. Grains are the main source of carbohydrates and participate in the metabolism of fats and proteins, ensuring complete oxidation and reducing the formation and excretion of toxic byproducts. Grains also provide dietary fiber. Therefore, it is recommended to include some staple grains in your meals.
3. Use oil sparingly. Because fat is a concentrated energy source, it produces more than twice the heat of protein and carbohydrates. Eating too much fat can easily lead to arteriosclerosis, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other health problems. Since we tend to eat more meat during holidays, we should use less oil when cooking.
1. Cooking Secrets: Less oil, less sugar, and less salt for better health. Too much fat can lead to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. Therefore, cooking methods such as steaming, boiling, blanching, stewing, roasting, braising, and cold dishes can reduce oil absorption. Furthermore, soups with high oil content can be easily skimmed off by refrigerating them slightly. Too much sodium (found in salt, soy sauce, MSG, and pickled foods) can cause water retention, leading to edema and high blood pressure.
2. There are secrets to drinking water. Drink plenty of plain water or tea, and avoid adding sugar to beverages. Sufficient water intake promotes bowel movements and improves constipation, which is especially important for people with high blood pressure. Water also helps excrete waste products from the body, aiding in the prevention and treatment of kidney and urinary tract stones.
After consuming large amounts of delicious foods such as chicken, duck, fish, and meat in a short period of time, many people experience symptoms such as dizziness, weakness, palpitations, and shortness of breath. Some may experience numbness in the upper limbs and tremors in the lower limbs, while a few may experience nausea and upper abdominal discomfort, a condition known as "delicious food syndrome." The underlying mechanism is that the foods consumed contain a relatively high amount of monosodium glutamate (MSG), which stimulates taste and increases appetite. If too much is consumed in a short period, the resulting glutamate cannot be absorbed, utilized, or excreted by the body in a timely manner, accumulating in large quantities and causing metabolic abnormalities, leading to illness. It is worth noting that children in their growth and development stage should not eat too much delicious food at once. Children have poor self-control and are prone to picky eating; parents should carefully monitor their children's diets, ensuring a balanced intake of both refined and whole grains, and a mix of meat and vegetables, to prevent delicious food syndrome caused by overeating.
Special emphasis: Drinking alcohol without food can easily damage the liver.
Since the breakdown of ethanol in the liver requires the participation of various enzymes and vitamins, the higher the ethanol content of the alcohol, the more enzymes and vitamins the body consumes, so timely replenishment is necessary. Fresh vegetables, fresh fish, lean meat, beans, and eggs are all good accompaniments to ethanol; however, foods such as salted fish, sausages, and cured meats contain pigments and nitrites, which can react with ethanol, damaging not only the liver but also the oral and esophageal mucosa.
Some people drink alcohol without eating any food, which may seem like a sign of boldness, but it actually harms their liver. From a health perspective, the higher the alcohol content, the more protein-rich foods should be consumed. Beef, roast chicken, fish, other animal products, and soy products are rich in methionine and choline, which can help protect the liver. This is a trick to drinking alcohol; many commercially available liver-protecting medications contain methionine and choline. Other foods, such as vinegared cold dishes, green vegetables, fruits, tofu, and fermented black beans, are also beneficial for liver protection.
Ethanol has a diuretic effect, which helps to excrete salts through urine. To replenish the salts lost in the body, it's best to drink a very lightly salted glass after drinking alcohol; however, you shouldn't drink too much, as drinking glass after glass of water is also detrimental to the liver. It's also best to eat some fruit, as the sugars in it can promote the metabolism of ethanol in the body, thereby reducing its toxicity to the liver.