Coffee fixes the damage booze did to your liver, study finds If your liver's packing it in after a lifetime of boozing, changing your poison may yet keep you alive a little longer. So says Dr Alex Hodge, a consultant gastroenterologist and liver disease specialist at Monash Health, a unit of Australia's Monash University. Hodge and her colleagues studied 1,100 patients with either …
"One bourbon, one scotch, one latte..."
I went skiing in Italy a few years ago. One day, I'd had a hankering for Black Russians all afternoon.
We went to a bar where the barman prided himself on knowing about cocktails. So I asked for my Black Russian, and watched his face fall...
He looked it up in his book, and then came over to our table looking sheepish. Apparently, they didn't have any Tia Maria, but they did have a local coffee liqueur, and would that do? Of course, I agreed.
It turned out that the local liqueur was made from espresso. So I was drinking a large slug of vodka with a significant percentage of a Bulgarian funbag of caffeine.
Three of those, and I was climbing the walls...
Vic.
"Judging by most cider drinkers I've seen, the ability to spell your own name.", what could that mean?
applez fur drinkin' not eatin' ;)
I guess someone with a skill level above the average commentard would have thought about that.
> blind test/bias
This is not a medication test. "Half the patients will drink real coffee, and half will be given a yet-to-be-invented placebo". I don't think so.
Also, I remember reading about a study giving the exact same result way back when, possibly even before the War On Stuff.
"What do you call Gold Blend and all the other "instant coffee" if not a placebo for real coffee?"
I thought the point of the placebo was that you couldn't taste the difference between it and the real substance under test.
The result of drinking poor coffee substitutes --------------------------------------->
They could have at least linked to this page, although the data isn't there either. You'd probably have to wade through the proceedings of The Liver Meeting, which sounds like a great jolly.
Perhaps their lunches were enjoyed with fava beans and a nice chianti?
Coffee contains loads of antioxidants, and probably has higher antioxidant content if made fresh from ground coffee beans via an expresso or other pressure based coffee brewer like an Aeropress. Decent coffee does not need milk to be drinkable. You can also brew coffee cold too, but that takes 18 hours and needs more ground coffee beans.
Instant coffee probably has less antioxidant content, which is one of the reasons it tends to taste less nice and needs milk and may need sweetening.
Coffee also protects the brain e.g. you're less likely to go senile etc.
The disease is fatty-liver disease, why does the liver become fatty? because one of the jobs of the liver is to process dietary fats (which travels via the lymphatic system to get there, not the blood stream). The liver packages the fat into Chlyomicrons for export into the blood stream for use by the body. However before it does so it does a kind of "stress test" on the lipids to check they're stable and not oxidised/oxidisable. If the test fails the Chlyomicron is re-absorbed into the liver as the body seems to think oxidised/oxidisable lipids are a no-no.
When alcohol is metabolised it produces a high level of reactive species (free radicals). If your diet consists of high levels of Heart healthy, cholesterol lowering poly-unsaturated(TM) (easily oxidised) fat these fats are easily oxidised/damaged and you set up a perfect storm if you drink heavily.
The damaged fats accumulate in the liver as it can't/wont export them and presto fatty liver disease.
A diet rich in saturated fat is apparently nearly wholly protective from alcolholic fatty liver disease and apparently just one meal rich in saturated fat can measurably protect the liver from a single bout of heavy drinking.
A diet rich in polyunsaturates is used to accelerate fatty-liver disease in rodents for study.
Makes you think.
Makes you think.
Deep fried Mars bar starts to make sense.
Although deep fried corned beef fritters should work as well. Perhaps a simpler approach still would be simply mixing an entire block of lard with a similar amount of flour, half the amount of milk, and a teaspoon of salt, pressing the mix back into the same cuboid shape as the original lard block. The resultant block to be deep fried to form a solid ingot of saturated fat batter, sold under the brand of "Ledswinger's Drinker's Friend".
This could be bigger than Pukka Pies in the after pub grub market.
"Ledswinger's Drinker's Friend"....Just thinking about that makes me feel ill!
Its only a solid manifestation of the phenomenon offered as "batter bits" by many chip shops. Could I interest you in LDF Crunch, which follows the original recipe, but has pork scratchings mixed in for additional taste and texture?
Or LDF Veggie (still lard based, but deep fried in some expensive and fashionable nut or vegetable oil)
LDF for Real Men (basic recipe, but deep fried in used engine oil)
LDF Protein Mix (with a scotch egg at the centre of the ingot)
LDF Low Fat (regular mix and method same actual fat content, just branded differently and sold at a higher price point)
LDF Ethical (again regular mix and method, just branded differently and sold at an even higher price point)
'The resultant block to be deep fried to form a solid ingot of saturated fat batter, sold under the brand of "Ledswinger's Drinker's Friend".'
Though I hesitate to mention it anyone familiar with some of the more obscure items on the menu in Eastern Germany/Polish border might suggest they have beaten you to it. At least we now know why - because obviously I was not drinking enough at the time of sampling to appreciate the beneficial effects.
"The resultant block to be deep fried to form a solid ingot of saturated fat batter, sold under the brand of "Ledswinger's Drinker's Friend"."
It will be snapped up by the bodybuilder/arctic explorer/heavy labourer contingents. Pemmican for the lazy I guess.
Here's one: I'm losing weight in a controlled kind of way to try to lower BP and offset a family history of type 2 diabetes.
Decided not to have any alcohol this month as a sort of Movember thing. Symptoms: none (we are moderate drinkers, well below max units except now and again when a session erupts) except having more money left when we do the weekly shop.
Tried no tea/coffee for a week a couple of months ago. Symptoms: raging headache and thirst for 24 hours, then amazing desire for salty snacks next day. OK on Day 3 and for the rest of the week.
Makes you think...
Makes you think.
It does indeed. A couple of months ago a newspaper published an article on the "alarming increase in alcohol-related liver disease" accompanied by an interesting graph. The graph showed a straight-line plot rising from around 1990 to 2012. Disappointingly there was no detailed discussion or analysis of the data, but I bet that women would be strongly represented as the impact of the "we can drink as much as men" and "shots culture" takes its toll.
BUT, behind the straight-line plot was a y=x2 curve of all liver disease, presented without comment. I'm wondering if your account throws some light on this.
It worries me that medical science seems to have things so wrong when it comes to basic nutrition (everyday medicine, if you will) on things like fats.
It worries me that medical science seems to have things so wrong when it comes to basic nutrition (everyday medicine, if you will) on things like fats.
And on a great many other apparently-straightforward questions regarding human diet.
The obvious conclusion would seem to be that nutrition and diet are complicated matters; that different subjects will respond differently to particular dietary configurations; that factors such as genetics, epigenetics, (other) environmental influences, and health history make an enormous difference in a subject's response; and that simple explanations of dietary effects are thus highly suspect.
Of course, we also have the problem that most people peddling dietary advice are quacks who can't even be bothered to find out that many of their precious rules have long been debunked. I don't know how many times I've seen articles repeating the "eight glasses of water" myth, or the "spinach is full of iron" one, and so on.
I have known people to get useful advice from time to time from dieticians, but it's been general advice for specific conditions, and carefully presented in terms of individual variation and cautions against simplistic interpretations.
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