A Break From Alcohol Can Help The Body

A professor from the University of Sydney said that taking two days a week as alcohol-free days could help reduce the lifetime exposure to alcohol when compared to occasional days of being alcohol-free when one is sick. Women are said to gain more from these breaks, reported the Sydney Morning Herald.

A gastroenterologist and a spokeswoman for the Australian Liver Association, Associate Professor Simone Strasser, said that the advantage of having two alcohol-free days in a week was that the reduction of lifetime exposure to alcohol could help in lowering the risk of liver disease as well as cancers related to alcohol. The cancers that are related to alcohol are breast cancer, colon cancer, oesophageal cancer and mouth cancer.

She said that too much drinking can cause liver damage more rapidly in women. She explained that she saw an increase in the number of deaths because of liver failure in young adults who were in their 20s and 30s and it was due to alcohol. She also said that this was seen especially in women.

Strasser explained that if one's liver was showing signs of liver disease, then a break of a month from alcohol could be enough to reverse the damage that had been caused. She said that usually the first stage of liver disease related to alcohol was the building up of fat in the organ. She added that if the liver disease had moved to the second stage where there was scarring on the liver, the organ's function could return to normal if the person abstained from alcohol.

Professor Ian Gilmore, the chairman of the Alcohol Health Alliance UK, a collaboration of many organisation that works towards reducing damage caused by alcohol abuse, agreed that two days of being alcohol-free in a week could be beneficial. He said that it could help in the prevention of psychological dependence.

According to Gilmore, if one could not get through the day without a drink of alcohol, one had to question themselves regarding why the dependency. He said that it was about the development of a sense of discipline so that one did not need alcohol on a daily basis.

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