what does alcohol do to your body what does it do to the liver the brain and why does it cause those symptoms that you see in people that are intoxicated or drunk and is there a safe amount of alcohol that people can ingest if so how much well in today's video we're going to answer all these questions and more so let's just jump right into it the type of alcohol that us humans ingest is ethyl alcohol or ethanol but I'll just refer to it as alcohol from here on out when we ingest and swallow the alcohol it will move down the esophagus and into the stomach now if I open this other stomach you can see the inside lining or the mucosal lining of the stomach the reason I'm showing you this is because some of the alcohol can actually be absorbed through the stomach lining and into the bloodstream however this is only a small amount but it is important to note that alcohol absorption and how fast it enters your bloodstream does depend on the contents of the stomach meaning that alcohol is absorbed more quickly on an empty stomach if for example there is fat and protein in the stomach this will slow that small amount that can be absorbed through the stomach and of more significance this will also slow gastric emptying essentially slowing the movements of the contents from the stomach into the small intestine and the small intestine is where the majority of alcohol is absorbed once the alcohol is absorbed from the stomach and the small intestine it will go directly to this large organ here the liver and many of you have likely already heard that the liver does the majority of the work to detoxify the body from the alcohol but understanding how the liver exactly does this is important because this will help us to understand some of the potential negative consequences of alcohol intake so again once the alcohol is absorbed into the blood from the small intestine and a little bit from the stomach all the blood vessels from these organs are going to funnel in to a vein called the hepatic portal vein hepatic just means liver now as a blood passes into the liver much of that Al alcohol will move into the liver cells called hepatocytes in order to be metabolized and that's what we have with our Brown rectangle here it's representing our liver cell or our hocy obviously not to scale but you get the idea and the first conversion that's going to take place is that alcohol will be converted into something called acetal deide and this requires the use of an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase as well as a co-actor called NAD you can see the NAD going in and coming out as nadh and these enzymes and co-actors will actually be important for discussion in just a second and actually for the remainder of the video so keep them in the back of your mind but it is interesting to note that the acetal theide is actually more toxic than the alcohol itself and plays a huge role in some of the negative impacts of alcohol so this next conversion by the liver cells is obviously going to be quite important the liver cells then convert the acetal dhide into acetate which requires another enzyme called alahh dehydrogenase as well as another NAD and this step actually occurs with within the mitochondria and as an FYI the first step occurred within the cytool of the liver cell acetate can then actually be utilized as energy this will require some more steps but nonetheless this is a much better option than having the toxic acetal ahid building up in the liver however again the reason I'm mentioning these enzymes in this co-actor NAD is because these will be important when we have situations of ingesting high levels of alcohol and or chronic use of alcohol I guess a little bit of a spoiler alert would be that we're going to find that we can overwhelm these systems which can have some negative effects on the body but I do want to come back to when we absorbed alcohol through the small intestine as well as that small amount through the stomach yes the blood coming from those organs does go directly to the liver but not all the alcohol will be able to move from the bloodstream and into those liver cells with the first pass of blood so that means some unmetabolized alcohol will be able to circulate throughout the body before passing through the liver again some of this will reach places that can directly get rid of the alcohol for example about 5% of alcohol can be excreted through the kidneys sweat glands and even through the lungs which is how you can smell alcohol in someone's breath and how the alcohol breathalizer test can detect alcohol but as the alcohol circulates throughout the rest of the body it can freely pass into the cells and obviously some of these cells are neurons that make up the brain but before we jump into how alcohol affects the brain I do want to take a second to say thank you to today's sponsor as this helps us to continue to create free content for our audience and that is ag1 ag1 is a foundational nutrition supplement that I've been drinking every day for about 2 and 1/2 years now and it's made with 75 highquality Whole Food Source ingredients including vitamins minerals superfoods probiotics and adaptogens this is a formulation based on the latest science that maintains the highest quality of standards and this is a huge reason as to why we feel comfortable partnering with this brand something else that is also important to me is that ag1 is NS f certified for sport which means that it's tested to ensure that what's on the label is actually found in the bottle ag1 also supports gut health with its pre and probiotic blend and maybe this is a little bit too much information but my bowel movements seem to be quite a bit more regular when I'm drinking ag1 as part of my routine and speaking of routines ag1 is ridiculously easy to make all you do is take one scoop add 8 ounces of water Shake It Up drink it down and carry on with your day and the more you can streamline and simplify your health routine the more more likely you are to adhere to it and getting so many highquality ingredients in one easy scoop certainly helps one to streamline their routine so if you're interested go to drink a1.com humananatura packets with your first purchase that info and the link will also be in the description below and let's get back to the brain when alcohol reaches the brain it affects multiple areas and we'll look at a few different areas that help to explain some of the commonly observed effects of alcohol the first that we'll discuss is the prefrontal cortex which is this area of the brain the prefrontal cortex is involved in multiple activities but to name a few things like reasoning thinking planning judgment and impulse control suppressing this area of the brain with alcohol explains why people often say and do things that they may not normally do if they were not otherwise drinking alcohol the hippocampus is another area affected by alcohol and one of its functions is to form and store short-term memory which explains alcohol's effects on memory and even the so-called blackouts that people experience at higher levels of alcohol intake next is the cerebellum which is this beautiful looking portion of the brain and this coordinates movement and balance and many other things but I'm sure you're not going to be surprised that alcohol affecting this area of the brain explains why people can stumble lose their balance and coordination and this overall suppression of motor function also maybe if you've EXP experience this or notice this in someone else drinking alcohol tends to make you pee a bit more the reason for this is that alcohol inhibits the secretion of a hormone called antidiuretic hormone that is secreted from this amazing structure called the pituitary gland and maybe you've heard of a diuretic a diuretic makes you urinate or PE more so anti-diuretic hormone tells your kidneys to hold on to more water thereby creating less urine so if you suppress this hormone your kidneys won't hold on to as much water causing more urine output and potentially leading to the dehydration that can occur with alcohol intake the last structure I want to mention is the medulla ablan this is actually part of your brain stem and it's an area that you don't really want to be suppressing much as it controls basic vital life functions such as breathing heart rate reflexes like vomiting and the gag reflex which is important to help prevent you from choking now alcohol's dangerous suppressing effects of the medulla obviously L are going to come at higher levels of alcohol intake but this is what is responsible for fatal cases of alcohol overdose or sometimes referred to as alcohol poisoning so why is it so detrimental to ingest higher levels of alcohol of course we could say that in general the symptoms that we just discussed become worse at higher levels of alcohol intake and in the case of overdose or poisoning could even be fatal but I want to come back to the liver in this pathway that we discussed earlier and discuss what happens if we were to ingest more and more alcohol as the liver cells have to take on and try to metabolize more alcohol again we could potentially overwhelm this metabolic pathway we only have so many liver cells and so many enzymes and co-actors but the liver cells can activate other Pathways at higher levels of alcohol intake one of them is referred to as the microsomal ethanol oxidizing system or pathway I know that's a mouthful but this occurs in the smooth endoplasmic reticulum of the liver cell and it uses an enzyme called cytochrome p450 the names again are aren't totally important here but I'm a nerd so I kind of had to mention those but notice that again this pathway creates more acetal dhide but another byproduct of this pathway is reactive oxygen species which you may have heard of as a type of a free radical but these reactive oxygen species can damage cellular components including DNA so we're creating another substance that could potentially be a problem here there also is another pathway for metabolizing alcohol and that occurs in these organel called peroxy they utilize hydrogen peroxide and a different enzyme called cataly but again converts that alcohol into acetal deide so notice what we've done here the liver recruits other metabolic pathways as we ingest more and more alcohol and this helps to a point but we continue to get this conversion to acetal ahid which we know is more toxic than the alcohol itself so this next step in the pathway becomes even more important so let's say we are drinking high amounts of alcohol and producing more acet cahide then say we could recycle that nadh back to NAD Andor we've maximized all the available alahh dehydrogenase so you could see how this could cause a buildup of acetal ahid in the liver which could damage the liver cells explaining why consistent intake of high amounts of alcohol could lead to liver disease such as curosis and even increasing one's risk of liver cancer also as an interesting FYI some people have a genetic predisposition to produce less alcohol dehydrogen and would therefore be more prone to accumulating more acetal dhide with lower amounts of alcohol consumption so how much alcohol is safe to drink first let's be clear about one thing everything that we've talked about today plus all the science the research the data it just shows that alcohol is toxic to the body there's no way to really get around that does that mean you can absolutely never drink it no obviously not as we've learned the body does have mechanisms to clear itself of alcohol but there are limitations to this as we've disc discussed but again can we come up with some guidelines on what are considered safe amounts of alcohol well it's probably not going to surprise you that there is some debate on this in the medical community but the 2020 to 2025 dietary guidelines for Americans advises no more than two drinks per day for males and one drink per day for non-pregnant females however some experts are starting to challenge even that amount and if you're trying to fully optimize your health it's likely that no more than two drinks a week is best and obviously there's the choice of completely abstaining from alcohol intake and then your body would never have to deal with metabolizing it also keep in mind that the safe dose tends to be lower in females than it does in males due to lower body size having proportionally less water and more fat than males on average and interestingly enough women also tend to have less of that enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase and for some people no level of alcohol consumption could be considered reliably safe such as someone that is pregnant a personal history of alcohol use disorder or certain diseases of the liver and the pancreas now the point of this video was not to judge anyone for alcohol consumption the goal was to provide anatomical and physiological information so that you could make your own informed decisions about your own alcohol consumption and hopefully you found some of this information useful and if you like learning about this you might also like learning about what caffeine does to your brain so if you're interested in learning more about caffeine in the brain meet me over in this video probably somewhere over one of these corners and of course thank you for supporting our Channel let us know what you thought of this video in the comments and I'll see you soon