Dr Federica Amati: What Alcohol is Really Doing to Your Body | GREAT MOMENTS

Summary

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Great Company with Jamie Laing

Episode: Dr. Federica Amati: What Alcohol is Really Doing to Your Body | GREAT MOMENTS
Date: January 26, 2026
Host: Jamie Laing
Guest: Dr. Federica Amati

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into how alcohol impacts the body—both physically and mentally—with renowned nutritionist Dr. Federica Amati. Jamie Laing and Dr. Amati explore hidden dangers associated with alcohol consumption, its status as a direct carcinogen, its societal harms, and the link between diet, mental health, and overall well-being. The episode challenges cultural assumptions and offers science-backed insights into making healthier lifestyle choices.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The "Big Hitters": Smoking, Alcohol, and Sedentary Lifestyle

[03:37–04:11]

• Jamie and Dr. Amati open by acknowledging the well-known dangers of smoking and lack of exercise.
• Dr. Amati: "Even though that’s like the one, well everyone knows that one, it’s like… But, you know, actually one of my friends… Have you ever smoked in the past? I did. See, there we go." (04:01)
• Vaping is also called out as unsafe, though marginally better than smoking.

2. The Hidden Health Risks

[04:12–05:11]

• Despite public awareness, many still engage in unhealthy habits like smoking when trying to conceive.
• Dr. Amati: “Women actively trying to conceive, smoking was quite a high percentage. So it’s like we know it, but we don’t know enough.” (04:43)

3. Alcohol as a Class 1 Carcinogen

[05:11–06:18]

• Dr. Amati breaks down WHO’s findings on carcinogens we ingest:
  • Alcohol (class 1—directly causes cancer)
  • Processed meats
  • Betel nut
  • Chinese saltfish
• Dr. Amati: “Alcohol is one of the only things we ingest which is a Class 1 carcinogenic...those are the only four ingestible things that cause cancer directly by themselves. And yet alcohol is pervasive. It’s everywhere.” (05:11–06:00)

Notable Quote

• “Alcohol is one of the only things we ingest which is a Class 1 carcinogenic.”
  — Dr. Amati (05:11)

4. Paradox of Moderate Drinking

[06:01–06:52]

• There may be a tiny, context-dependent protective effect of a single glass of red wine with a meal, especially within the Mediterranean diet and lifestyle.
• Dr. Amati: “A glass of red wine with your family...is such a minor part of the other greatness that's part of that lifestyle, that it probably just helps people come together and have a moment of like, cheers.” (06:19–06:52)

5. Binge Drinking Culture in the UK

[06:52–09:07]

• Binge drinking is directly linked to increased cancer risk, particularly liver and GI tract cancers, and notably, breast cancer in postmenopausal women.
• Dr. Amati: “Each unit of alcohol increases breast cancer risk by a measurable amount in all the data analysis...If you can live without drinking alcohol, you’re probably better off not drinking alcohol.” (08:12–09:07)
• Some women become intolerant to alcohol post-menopause, which may serve as a protective mechanism.

Notable Quote

• “For those people who like drinking, like there’s no benefit to drinking, right? So if you can live without drinking alcohol, you’re probably better off not drinking alcohol.”
  — Dr. Amati (09:05–09:07)

6. The Social and Societal Damage of Alcohol

[09:07–10:23]

• Alcohol is far more harmful to society than other substances, based on research by Professor David Nutt.
• Dr. Amati: “Alcohol is so harmful to society that it’s the only reason that that axis [of social harm] is so big. It’s just up there somewhere, like completely off the scale.” (09:15–10:00)
• Alcohol’s accessibility and its tendency to promote aggression contribute heavily to social problems (violence, driving, rape, etc.).

Notable Quote

• “Alcohol is not a good drug for society.”
  — Dr. Amati (10:10)

7. Alcohol, Diet, and the Mental Health Crisis

[10:23–15:09]

• Jamie asks whether the mental health “pandemic” is connected to diet and environment.
• Dr. Amati: “Of course. I think it’s really important that we think of human beings as a whole thing...our physical health is suffering, our environment isn’t set up for us to thrive. Our mental health is obviously going to suffer too.” (10:37–11:40)
• Social context, trauma, and access to nutritious food are crucial for recovery from mental health conditions—therapy alone isn’t enough.
• Dietary choices and mental health form a feedback loop: depression makes nutritious cooking harder, and poor diet worsens mental health.
• The SMILES trial (Prof. Felice Jacka, Australia) showed that a Mediterranean diet can reduce depression severity by up to 30%, at a lower economic cost than standard diets.
  • Jamie Laing: “Get out of here.” (14:34)
  • Dr. Amati: “Giving a Mediterranean Digestive intervention...she found that she could reduce severity of depression symptoms by up to 30%.” (15:09)

8. Treating the Whole Person

[15:09–16:27]

• Mental and physical health are inseparable. Treating just the symptoms isn’t enough; the whole context of a person's life matters for healing.
• Dr. Amati: “People with severe mental health conditions like schizophrenia, their life expectancy is 20 years less...because their metabolic health, their diet, their physical activity, their social isolation is such that they lose 20 years of life.” (16:10–16:25)
• Supporting a holistic, “patient-centered care” model is key for individual and public health.

Notable Quote

• “We can’t—if someone is suffering, you need to treat the whole person, not just symptom."
  — Dr. Amati (16:27)

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Memorable Quotes (with Timestamps & Attribution)

• “Alcohol is one of the only things we ingest which is a Class 1 carcinogenic.” — Dr. Amati (05:11)
• “For those people who like drinking, like there’s no benefit to drinking, right? So if you can live without drinking alcohol, you’re probably better off not drinking alcohol.” — Dr. Amati (09:05–09:07)
• “Alcohol is so harmful to society...like completely off the scale.” — Dr. Amati (10:00)
• “We don’t live in systems, we live...as whole people.” — Dr. Amati (11:12)
• “Giving a Mediterranean Dietary intervention...she found that she could reduce severity of depression symptoms by up to 30%.” — Dr. Amati (15:09)
• “If someone is suffering, you need to treat the whole person, not just symptom.” — Dr. Amati (16:27)

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Important Timestamps

• 03:37–04:11 — Traditional health risks: smoking, alcohol, sedentary life
• 05:11–06:00 — Alcohol as a carcinogen; processed meats and other harmful substances
• 06:18–06:52 — Mediterranean diet and moderate wine consumption
• 06:52–09:07 — Binge drinking, cancer risk, especially for postmenopausal women
• 09:15–10:00 — Alcohol’s unique harm to society (study by David Nutt)
• 10:37–11:40 — Connection between diet/environment and mental health
• 13:46–15:09 — SMILES trial: Diet’s direct impact on treatment-resistant depression
• 16:10–16:27 — Life expectancy and holistic care in mental health

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Tone & Final Thoughts

The conversation combines scientific rigor with practical, compassionate advice. Jamie’s inquisitive, everyman style draws out relatable examples and clarifications from Dr. Amati, who is frank and evidence-driven but optimistic about positive change.

Dr. Amati’s core message is clear: Alcohol isn’t just unhealthy; it’s uniquely dangerous among social drugs. The best strategy for long-term health—physical and mental—is to treat one’s body and mind as inseparable. Start with small, sustainable changes in diet and habits, and always consider the wider life context when seeking well-being.

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For those inspired by Dr. Federica Amati’s insights, the full episode and more resources are linked in the episode description.

Transcript

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[Jamie Lang]

Hello, everyone. I'm Jamie Lang. And this is great moments in terms of chronic disease.

[Dr. Amarti]

So we.

[Podcast Host]

I get it.

[Jamie Lang]

You know, smoking, not good. Alcohol. Sure. Yeah. Not good, not good. And I want to ask about alcohol. I want to get into that. The other thing, not moving, not exercising. We understand those are the sort of.

[Dr. Amarti]

Yeah.

[Jamie Lang]

Ones. They're the big hitters. What are the hidden ones that we don't really know. And what are the unhealthy food habits that we're not sure about as well?

[Dr. Amarti]

Okay. I think they're the big hitters. But how many people still smoke?

[Jamie Lang]

I would say a lot.

[BetterHelp Narrator]

Quite a lot.

[Dr. Amarti]

And vaping, not safe. Like, is it better than smoking cigarettes? Sure. Should we do it? No. So, so like, it seems obvious, but people still walk around smoking and vaping. And so even though that's like the one. Well, everyone knows that one. It's like. Yeah. But you know, actually one of my friends. Have you ever smoked in the past? I did. See, there we go. My boyfriend smoked.

[Jamie Lang]

Yeah, See, there we go.

[Dr. Amarti]

Did I know what I know now? No, not so much. And also, like, not defending this at all, actually. But since then, the smoking ban has come in. Since then, it feels like public health understanding of how bad smoking is has improved. And it's true also that younger people are smoking less now, so that statistically it's a trend, which is great.

[Jamie Lang]

And drinking less alcohol.

[Dr. Amarti]

And drinking less alcohol as well. But, you know, if you look at. So Dr. Helen O', Neill, she's wonderful. She runs hertility, which is a. She's a dream. So her, her research that she did, women actively trying to conceive smoking was quite High percentage, you know, so it's like we know it, but we don't know enough. We can still repeat it. Don't smoke. And with alcohol drinking similarly, it's one of the only things that we ingest which is a Class 1 carcinogenic.

[Jamie Lang]

What does that mean?

[Dr. Amarti]

So it's labeled, it's understood as directly causing cancer by itself. Very few things that we ingest are Class 1 carcinogens. Right. A handful, in fact. Alcohol is one of them. The second one is processed meat, so, you know, salamis, pastramis, those kinds of meats. The third one is betel nut, which is very hard. I've never seen it, I've never come across it in the uk, but it's a carcinogen. And the fourth one is Chinese saltfish. Again, I have not come across it, but is a carcinogen. Those four things are the only things. When you look at this quite terrifying graphic, which is put out by the WHO Cancer Research Group, those are the only four ingestible things that cause cancer directly by themselves. And yet alcohol is pervasive. It's everywhere.

[Jamie Lang]

That is.

[Dr. Amarti]

And we advertise it too. It's not just that it's available, we actually have alcohol adverts encouraging us to drink it. Now, you know, on the flip side of that, research shows that having a glass of red wine with your meal could be protective. And some of the centenarians of the world.

[Jamie Lang]

Do you believe that?

[Dr. Amarti]

Yeah, I do, because the reason I believe that is because our body is very good at helping us stay alive. And I do believe that having a glass of red wine. But, you know, a glass of red wine, no one drinks that. It's like this much. I think a glass of red wine with your family sitting down in the context of a Mediterranean diet brings us together and is so such a minor part of the other greatness that's part of that lifestyle, that it probably just helps people come together and have a moment of like. Cheers. Great.

[Jamie Lang]

So the binge drinking culture we have in the UK is literally killing us.

[Dr. Amarti]

Yeah, yeah. It's directly contributing to the cancers that we see. So especially liver and gastrointestinal tract, so esophagus, mouth, stomach and colon cancer directly. And also one that I think is really not spoken enough about enough is in postmenopausal women, drinking alcohol is one of the biggest risk factors for breast cancer. Why so? Well, it's. Again, it's a carcinogen. The exact mechanism as to why specifically breast cancer is something that I haven't. I Don't know why exactly that like, so I know that there's a relationship there and there's a very obvious causative link. If we had to like understand at cellular level, why specifically breast cancer, I don't know. I'd have to think about it for a minute. But it's such a, it's a well established relationship and a lot of women post menopausal actually interestingly come to me and say, I can't, I don't tolerate alcohol anymore. I don't know why I can't drink. And I used to drink quite a lot. So in some, in some people, like, it's almost like their body rejects it, which is good because the relationship it has with increasing risk, each unit of alcohol increases breast cancer risk by a measurable amount in all the data analysis. So I think, you know, if people, I do get asked about alcohol drinking by the press because it's, people love reading about it and do I, do I drink? Do I have an occasional glass of red wine? Yeah, I do. I do. When we have family around for dinner or maybe we're celebrating a birthday. But genuinely that's the only time I will drink alcohol. And I think when it's in a social context where it's part of the social gathering, not the point of the social gathering, because if you're going out for drinks, you're going out for the drink and then who's. There's there kind of thing that's different. So I think there is such a thing as maybe drinking in a way that isn't going to be too detrimental to health. But for those people who like drinking, like there's no benefit to drinking, right? So if you cannot, if you can live without drinking alcohol, you're probably better off not drinking alcohol. Okay.

[Jamie Lang]

And also with alcohol as well, it's not only the sort of effects that it has physically or mentally as well, it shatters us.

[Dr. Amarti]

And Jamie, if you look at. So David Nutt, another legend, Professor David Nutt, who got thrown out of Parliament for saying that ecstasy was safer than alcohol. He was right. He did this beautiful study where he plotted the harm to health and the harm to society of each drug. And you have all the different drugs and you get, you know, right at the bottom, which is not harmful to anyone, is like mushrooms, just harmless. You know, people who take mushrooms don't really harm themselves. They don't really harm anyone else. And then you could go up and heroin and cocaine, pretty harmful to self, a little bit harmful to society, right? Then you go to alcohol and it's off the scale. It actually means alcohol is so harmful to society that it's the only reason that that access is so big. It's just up there somewhere, like completely off the scale.

[Paige Desorbo]

Why?

[Jamie Lang]

Because it makes you aggressive.

[Dr. Amarti]

It makes you aggressive. Like the amount of alcohol related incidents, driving, aggression, rape, I mean, name it, alcohol is not a good drug for society.

[Jamie Lang]

But is that because it's accessible?

[Dr. Amarti]

I mean, probably partly.

[Jamie Lang]

Right, but still that doesn't.

[Dr. Amarti]

But I think it's also just because alcohol does tend to cause aggression generally. More generally, it's a bit more of an aggressive drug.

[Jamie Lang]

Can I ask you a big question? Do you think there's a synergy between this pandemic of mental health, anxiety, depression, all these different things? It's like a lava going through towns and cities throughout our country. Do you think there's a correlation between our diet?

[Dr. Amarti]

Yes, 100%. Yeah. Really? Of course. I think it's really important that we think of human beings as a whole thing. So our mental health is not detached from our physical health. Our mental health and our physical health depends on our environment. So to we know that our environment is not supporting our health. So it should be. It's kind of no surprise that whilst our physical health is worsening, our mental health will also worsen because we are one thing. So you can't separate people into systems. Right. If I said to you, you know, Jimmy, I've got really terrible backache, well, that backache will be impacting my sleep, it will be impacting my mood because I'm not sleeping and I'm in pain. It will impact how much I'm able to move, which will then impact other things. Like we don't live in systems, we live as in whole people. And in the same way that our physical health is suffering, our environment isn't set up for us to thrive. Our mental health is obviously going to suffer too.

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[Jamie Lang]

We separate everything.

[Dr. Amarti]

Yeah. And it's pointless.

[Jamie Lang]

We think, oh, it's my brain, I'm feeling depressed. No, it's everything. Everything's connected. It's everything.

[Dr. Amarti]

The patients that I looked at in my PhD, they were mental health service users. And when you looked, I tried to predict. How could you predict patient outcomes? Like, what is it about the people coming into the services that could help us understand whether they're likely to recover or not? That was my question and the question, the answers were various. But one of them is basically you can't take context away. So if somebody comes into a mental health service and they, they have no access to housing and they can't get nutritious food every day and they have lived a trauma. Then we can give the best cognitive behavior therapy there is. But then they'll, they'll improve, but they're not going to be undepressed, they're not going to suddenly go below threshold because we've delivered a good service. There's context. Context is always king. Right? So whilst we try to understand how to improve people's health, and mental health is huge, and it's such an important topic, we have to understand that we need to treat people as a whole. So patient centered care, that's actually what my master's dissertation was in for public health. Patient centered care predicts how well people will recover from an illness or feel better, because when you address the entire person as a whole, they're much more likely to be able to feel better and to improve their health on the whole picture, not just one thing. So, of course, I'm not suggesting that if you cut your wrist, then you just treat the cut, but when we're talking about these issues that impact our quality of life like mental health does, it's not only does diet impact the likelihood of us having mental health issues, but if you suffer with mental health, you're also going to make different dietary choices, because cooking up a delicious meal that's really nutritious when you have severe depression is super hard because you don't.

[Jamie Lang]

Have any energy you don't want to do.

[Dr. Amarti]

It's hard to get out of bed, let alone cook up a feast. So there's this, really one of the seminal trials on this is called the Smiles trial, and it was run by Professor Felice Jacka in Australia. And it took her ages to even get funding to recruit the patients for this because no one believed it would work. She wanted to see what happened if you had a group of patients with resistant depression. So these are patients who've had cbt, they've also got sometimes pharmacotherapy, so drugs. And she wanted to see if she could make a difference by changing their diets. And they ran the trial and it was randomized. So she didn't know. When she got the data and they analyzed it, they didn't know which group was which. And when she first ran it, she thought they'd switched the groups by mistake because it was such a change.

[Jamie Lang]

Get out of here.

[Dr. Amarti]

Seriously. So she found that in her, in this trial, and I think it's been repeated now, replicated rather, she found that giving a Mediterranean Dietary intervention. So very. She also did an affordability study with this. So she showed that the diet that she recommended these patients was actually more affordable than the diet that we were on to start with. Right. So it was actually cheaper to eat this way. The Mediterranean dietary intervention with a little bit of red meat, because a lot of these patients would be 12 deficient. She found that she could reduce severity of depression symptoms by up to 30%.

[Jamie Lang]

Wow.

[Dr. Amarti]

And these people were resistant, so they had like, really resistant depression. So we know that we can improve mental health symptoms. And we also know that there's lots of beautiful reviews done on things like Mediterranean diet and likelihood of developing depression and likelihood of developing anxiety. And if you have a Mediterranean dietary pattern, then you're less likely to develop these conditions. So we know that it can help protect against mental health issues. Now, having transient mental health problems is part of being human. So I think we also need to, you know, it's normal to have periods where you have issues with your mental health, but it's the resilience, it's the being able to recover. It's for it not to become a chronic mental health condition. That's what we want. And yeah, diet absolutely plays a part not only in prevention, but also actually in curing it and making sure people can live a healthy life. I mean, people with severe mental health conditions like schizophrenia, their life expectancy is 20 years less than people without. That's not because schizophrenia is killing them. That's not what it is. It's because their metabolic health, their diet, their physical activity, their social isolation is such that they lose 20 years of life.

[Jamie Lang]

That is wild.

[Dr. Amarti]

You know, the two things go hand in hand and we can't. If someone is suffering, you need to treat the whole person, not just symptom.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, so many incredible insights there from Dr. Amarti. She's amazing. Head Nutritionist at Zoe now, what she said about alcohol, basically, if you can live without it, you'll be better off. I mean, it kind of makes you stop and think, doesn't it? Would definitely made me stop and think. I also thought more about my diet. How important is to take time to think about what I'm putting in my body so I can feel better both physically and more importantly, mentally. Now there are so many insights and practical tips and Dr. Frederica's full episode now we're going to leave the link in the show description so you can click on that and go straight to it. And she's just one of the many incredible experts we've had in great company. So if you haven't already, go and check out the rest. Don't forget to follow and subscribe and we'll see you next week for a brand new episode of Great Company.

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