Alcohol

• • Alcohol is a ‘downer’.
  • Most beers contain 5% or more alcohol, wines around 12% and spirits mostly 30% to 40%.
  • Mixed drinks and alcopops contain 5% to 8% alcohol.
  • Shots (spirits in small glasses or bottles) can contain up to 35% alcohol.
  • Alcohol disperses throughout your body.
  • Young people and women have lower amounts of bodily fluids (water mostly). If you’re a woman or you’re not fully grown, the same drink will result in a higher % of alcohol in your blood, compared to a man or a fully grown person.

After a couple of drinks, you feel cheerful and relaxed.

• You feel more self-confident and talkative.
• If you keep drinking, you get overconfident. You soon have more trouble reacting correctly to situations.
• If you still keep drinking, your cheerful mood may disappear.
• You have more trouble talking, walking and focusing your eyes

• What are the risks of drinking alcohol?

  • You can get blackouts and forget what happened the night before. A blackout is a temporary loss of memory, whereby information from your short-term memory is not transferred to your long-term memory. You may not know the next day what you did or where you were on the night before. Greyouts are fragmentary blackouts in which you remember parts of what happened and forget others.
  • You can get hangovers and feel headachy and queasy all day.
  • You can get alcohol poisoning and pass out from drinking large amounts. If you drink so much alcohol that you pass out or lose consciousness, your breathing can stop altogether. Alcohol poisoning can be fatal. In adults, a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 4 per mil is enough to cause alcohol poisoning. Adolescents admitted to hospital with alcohol poisoning have been found to have BACs averaging 1.9 per mil. Boys weighing 50 kilos reach that level after 7 standard drinks and girls after 6 drinks.
  • Lack of rational thinking. This can result in accidents and fights or forgetting about the ‘safe’ part when having sex.

• Heart and blood vessels: greater risk of high blood pressure and brain haemorrhaging, as well as heart attacks, heart failure and heart rhythm disturbances.
• Gastritis (inflamed stomach lining): bloated feeling, burping, stomach ache and heartburn.
• Liver disease: chronic liver damage arising from excessive metabolisation of alcohol by the liver.
• Cancer: evidence-based higher risks of alcohol-related cancer of the bowel, breast, oesophagus and mouth; greater risk of liver cancer linked to heavy drinking.
• Pancreatitis: inflammation of the pancreas caused by excessive stimulation of fluid secretion.
• Brain injury: reduced brain functioning, as alcohol affects all brain functions; higher risk of brain injury from a long-term average weekly consumption of 25 standard units; up to 15% brain shrinkage from excessive alcohol consumption.
• Psychosis: alcohol-induced psychosis, with delusions and hallucinations triggered by excessive alcohol intake.
• Emaciation: loss of appetite due to the satiated feeling you get from alcohol.
• Alcohol makes you fat. One beer contains over 100 calories, a small glass of wine has 80 and a mixed drink has 170 calories.
• Dependency and addiction. Alcohol is an addictive substance, both physically and mentally. Nearly half of all patient applications to Dutch addiction services are for alcohol treatment. If you have been drinking a lot of alcohol for a long period of time, you may experience withdrawal symptoms, including shakiness, sweating, anxiety, panic, serious tensions and sleep disturbances. People who start drinking at a young age have a higher risk of alcohol addiction, and the risk is especially high for males under age 24. The risk is also higher if you use alcohol to alter your mood.