Booze after workout beneficial, study says

^^ Yeah, but do you even bother with the "workout" part to begin with?

There's already a thread discussing this very article(different source though) over at Social Life, Food, and Drink, FYI.

Cutting off your legs decreases the risk of peripheral artery disease, too! Alcohol being 'good' for the heart doesn't mean it's a healthy lifestyle choice. It's awful for exercise and your liver.

Like you needed another reason to mitigate your drinking.

You and your "˜facts'!


+1.

Conne, are you simply looking for excuses to partake in excess drinking?

Jon.

By the way, I believe the article only mentions that working out and moderate alcohol intake both contribute to health. Personally, I think that the cons of alcohol outweigh the benefits and there are other better ways to be healthy. ...But my point is that alcohol right after a workout is a stupid idea. Your body treats alcohol as a poison. It basically stops processing other things until the alcohol is taken care of. So this would not be a good move at a time when your body needs protein and carbs asap.

I once heard drunk people are 70% more likely to have sex.

So one night I stayed home and drink.

Nothing happened.*
















*: I did look a tad more ripped the next morning. Not that it mattered, for no one was watching

Seriously ^^


This argument, having already been discussed around this corner, is full of holes IMO. A shot of tequilla is like, what, 100 calories? Ain't nothin' after a real workout.

Since most of the empty calories in alcohol are to be converted into carbs anyway, what if my pre-WO meal already fulfill the protein requirement?

re: pros/cons of drinking
Here are some readings for you to chew over:
http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/AlcoholAndHealth.html
http://www.brewers.ca/EN/about_beer/health.htm (discuss teh article, not the source if you can)
Drinking does not kill brain cells
A neat summary

^ Those articles list a lot of studies, but they don't actually have the abstracts and they don't talk about how the studies were done. I learned a long time ago that taking study results at face value leaves out a lot of information and doesn't give you the whole picture. The last article, by the way, seems to support my position. I do realize that there may be certain cardiac-related benefits to alcohol. I still don't think it's necessary for good health, and I think that many of the effects could be had by other means. Also, the reasons I am against it are not only nutritional. I'm not really interested in changing anyone else's mind though. Regarding alcohol around workouts, it's my understanding that even if you have plenty of protein before your WO, the body would preferentially metabolize the alcohol in your blood after you drink, whatever else was going on with the protein before. So this would prevent your body from getting the better stuff that you should be giving it at that time. There's also the dehydration issue. Then again, Arnold apparently used to drink beer PWO, so.....meh. I say just do whatever helps you achieve your goals healthily.

It does. Goes to show there are contrasting opinions on almost every topics in nutrition and training.


Agreed on both.

The calories are not important -- the lost time is. Your liver is occupied when it's processing alcohol instead of metabolizing fat or synthesizing amino acids. If your pre-workout meal simply fuels you through your workout and the protein ends up being metabolized via gluconeogensis, you lost quite a few amino acids you might have needed. It also depends on when the protein was ingested, what serum insulin levels were like during the workout, how long the workout was, etc. Alcohol is also not converted into carbohydrates. Alcohol is metabolized into acetate and enters the lactic acid part of the Krebs cycle, meaning it is metaboilized more like fat (or more approriately like lactic acid). Excess energy from the alcohol is converted into fat when insulin levels rise. Arnold used to drink beer early in his workout as a post-workout meal. He was also on steroids and learned a bit more about nutrition as his career went on and stopped. A lot of his methods were wrong...the fact that he did well during his time doesn't mean his methods should be duplicated by you. Unless, of course, you also believe penicillin to be superior to modern antibiotics and use brandy as a painkiller simply because it worked in antiquity.

Smart post, studies can be 'massaged'. It's takes several and a critical critque of the downfalls of each study to give you a better idea of what the data is 'maybe' presenting. You always have to look at what bias the authors may have and who is funding the study also.

Oh how the misinformation doth fly through this thread. There also seems to be a lack of understanding what "one or two drinks a night means". Thats 2 oz of hard liquor, 2 16oz beers (more likely between 10 and 16 oz), OR 2 3oz glasses of wine.

More likely it's something like that two or three times a week, not nightly. And no binge drinking on the weekends and other stuff like that, since it will offset any benefits gained by moderate consumption.


Excessive alcohol is. Alcohol is actually better on your liver than regular strength tylenol when taken in reasonable doses. That's one reason why they put acetaminophen in Vicodin, to prevent abuse through liver damage.


Alcohol taken in reasonable doses is actually very healthy, even hard liquors. It's also not treated as a "poison", but as a burst of raw and easily metabolized energy. That's why it would get fully metabolized "first", because it can be metabolized the fastest.

The metabolites of alcohol are slightly poisonous, though. Not very much, hence why its safe in reasonable doses.


Acetaldehyde, a slight but important difference to why alcohol causes the fatty acid and subsequent rapid build up of fat cells that vinegar doesn't.

While I'm not sure as to the medical benefits, my roomate is a semi-professional runner and he's convinced that having 1 beer the evening after a really intense training day helps him to recover faster. He said that it had something to do with the fermentation process. Anyone have any ideas why this would be the case?

Alcohol is better than Tylenol, therefore alcohol is healthy for the liver... Non sequitur arguments are awesome. And no, acetaminophen is not put into Vicodin to prevent abuse by potentially killing the recipient; it's a pain reliever that works differently from hydrocodone to reduce pain. Combining both generic drugs results in a stronger pain reliever overall. No, alcohol is not 'healthy'. Please stop making ridiculous blanket statements. It's like saying cocaine is healthy because it works as a local anesthetic. Anything deemed as 'healthy' needs a proper dosage and use for the health benefits. Using alcohol is not 'healthy' unless in certain circumstances (e.g. non-exercising older individual with possible heart problems). I certainly wouldn't tell an athlete to begin using alcohol because it's 'healthy' for their heart, because the athlete's daily activities provide sufficient heart health and alcohol would likely have a detrimental effect. Re-read what I wrote. I didn't go into alcohol metabolism in detail, but dealt strictly with how it's metabolized into energy (ie. not like carbohydrates). If you want to educate everyone, at least make sure you a) know what you're talking about and b) read what was already fucking written. No, and it sounds like he doesn't either. Alcohol after a workout is a surefire way to kill the recovery process.