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The Neuro Experience
WHY YOU MUST QUIT ALCOHOL (Andrew Huberman, Jordan Peterson, Matthew Walker)
00:19:32
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- [00:00]
Narrator
The world that we live in will have you believe that drinking alcohol is a good, positive and beneficial thing. Look at how it's portrayed in the movies, look at how it's marketed. Look at the branding of alcohol. Heck, look at the hundreds of celebrities that are launching their own alcohol brands or endorsing different kinds of alcohol. We are bombarded with information about the great things that happen when we drink a poisonous drug from day one of being born in the world. But here's the crazy thing. If we were to make every single drug legal and you could go into a fucking, a pharmacy or a chemist and they had all the drugs that are currently illegal, all there available for purchase, but it was the 100 pure substance of every single drug. It wasn't cut with anything like that. It was just a pure drug. If you walked into that store, you would have a bottle of pure alcohol that nobody would ever buy because there'd be a label on it saying, warning, do not consume. This will kill you. If you drink this entire bottle, you will die. That would be the drug that everybody would be scared to go near. But that exact same drug is the same thing that, that tens of millions of people are drinking. They're just drinking the diluted version of it. It's mass insanity. And finding conflicting information about how great alcohol is isn't easy. So today in this video, we've compiled a list of experts who are challenging the status quo. And they're not afraid to go against the grain and give you a different perspective on alcohol. So if you want some motivation on getting alcohol out of your life, watch this entire video.
- [01:26]
Dr. David Nutt
I hate to break it to you, but the reality is ethanol produces substantial damage to cells. And it does that because when you ingest ethanol, it's broken down into acetyl aldehyde. And if you thought ethanol was bad, acetaldehyde is particularly bad. Acetyl aldehyde is poison. It will kill cells, it damages and kills cells, and it is indiscriminate as to which cells it damages and kills. It is the poison, the acetyl aldehyde itself, that leads to the effect of being inebriated or drunk. Most people don't realize that that being drunk is actually a poison induced disruption in the way that your neural circuits work.
- [02:01]
Dr. Mark Bellis
Alcohol is often used as a sleep aid, but alcohol is quite different in that regard. Alcohol is trying to essentially knock out your cortex.
- [02:11]
Dr. Susan Smith
There is no safe dose of alcohol because alcohol affects the development of synapses of the brain. People who drink at an early age, heavily have Been shown to have significantly smaller brains and reduced cognitive ability.
- [02:22]
Addiction Counselor
If we had to make a bad drug legal, the worst choice was alcohol.
- [02:26]
Neurologist
It is one of the most destructive drugs to various parts of your, of your body and different organs.
- [02:32]
Narrator
You might want to put down your drink to hear this. No amount of alcohol is safe.
- [02:37]
Public Health Expert
I should mention that alcohol is actually considered a Class 1 carcinogen or cancer causing agent by the World Health Organization. So that's the same category as benzene and tobacco smoke.
- [02:48]
Dr. Mark Bellis
No fat family in Britain which doesn't have someone who's been damaged by alcohol.
- [02:52]
Addiction Counselor
Alcohol is, it's, it's, well, it's a hell of a, it's a hell of a drug, man.
- [02:59]
Dr. David Nutt
When you drink alcohol, it can pass into all the cells and tissues of your body. It has no trouble just passing right into those cells. The fact that it can pass into so many organs and cells so easily is really what explains its damaging effects. Ethanol produces substantial damage to cells and, and it does that because when you ingest ethanol, it has to be converted into something else because it is toxic to the body. It's broken down into acetyl aldehyde. And if you thought ethanol was bad, acetyl aldehyde is particularly bad. Acetyl aldehyde is poison. It will kill cells, it damages and kills cells and is indiscriminate as to which cells it damages and kills. The key thing to understand here is that when you ingest alcohol, you are, yes, ingesting a poison. And that poison is converted into an even worse, worst poison in your body. It is the poison, the acetaldehyde itself, that leads to the effect of being inebriated or drunk. I think most people don't realize that, that being drunk is actually a poison induced disruption in the way that your neural circuits work. In thinking about the biochemical effects of alcohol and what it's doing to the body, what it's doing, in all cases, it's consumed into the gut. The liver immediately starts this conversion. Ethanol to acetyl aldehyde to acetate and some amount of acetyl aldehyde n acetyl acetate are making it into the brain. It crosses the blood brain barrier. Most things thankfully can't pass across the blood brain barrier. But alcohol, because it's water and fat soluble, just cruises right across this fence and into the milieu, the environment of the brain.
- [04:32]
Neuroscientist
So it goes into every nook and cranny in the brain and there it has lots of influences. So it slows down the excitatory signals. It Speeds up the inhibitory signals.
- [04:46]
Dr. David Nutt
There's a slight suppression in the activity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex. This is an area of your neocortex that's involved in thinking and planning, perhaps above all in suppression of impulsive behavior. And as you shut down the prefrontal cortex, that GABAergic suppression of impulses starts to be released. So people will say things that they want to say without so much forethought about they're saying. Or they might do things that they want to do without really thinking it through quite as much. Or they might not even remember thinking it through at all. One of the more important things to know about the effects of alcohol in the brain is areas of the brain that are involved in flexible behavior, Sort of considering different options, like I could do A or I could do B. Those brain areas basically shut down.
- [05:29]
Addiction Counselor
Probably the most common detriment that alcohol has to the brain is the fact that alcohol is a depressant to the central nervous system. So it impairs your judgment and it impairs your reflexes and your ability to think through.
- [05:42]
Dr. David Nutt
And top down inhibition is diminished. That is, habitual behavior and impulsive behavior starts to increase. This is true in the short term. So after people have one or two, maybe three or four drinks. But it's also true that the more often that people drink, there are changes in the very circuits that underlie habitual and impulsive behavior. For the person that drinks, say, every Thursday night, it goes out only on Saturdays, but every Saturday, there's evidence that there are changes in the neural circuits of the brain that control habitual behavior and impulsive behavior. And they are modified and strengthened in ways that make those people more habitual and more impulsive outside the times in which they are drinking. And when they drink, impulsive and habitual behavior tends to increase even further. When we ingest alcohol, the toxic effects of alcohol disrupt those mood circuitries at first, making them hyperactive. This is why people become really talkative. People start to feel really good after a few sips of alcohol. At least most people do. Then, as they congest more alcohol, serotonin levels and the activity of those circuits really starts to drop. And that's why people feel less good. And typically, what they do, they go and get another drink and they attempt to kind of restore that feeling of well being and mood. Now, typically, what happens is that as people ingest the third and fourth, maybe even the fifth drink, there's an absolute zero chance of them recovering that energized mood.
- [07:03]
Addiction Counselor
Right?
- [07:04]
Dr. David Nutt
Most People, as they drink more and more, will now start to feel more and more suppressed. The forebrain is now shutting down quite a lot. A lot of the motor cortical areas that control coordinated movement and deliberate movement start to shut down. So people start to slur their speech, people start to shuffle their feet, people forget their posture. We'll start to lean on things. People start passing out on couches. There's a great depression.
- [07:25]
Addiction Counselor
It makes you more extroverted and enthusiastic while you're on the ascending limb of the blood alcohol curve, which is why you have to keep drinking once you start, because if you plateau, that goes away. So you got to keep drinking. So that's one thing, it makes you more enthusiastic and more full of positive emotion. And the second thing it does is reduce anxiety. And so if you are a bit more socially anxious and you also have that positive response to alcohol, which everyone doesn't have, by the way, then it's a great drug. But the problem is it's. Well, it's a great drug for the moment.
- [07:51]
Narrator
Right.
- [07:52]
Addiction Counselor
Right. There's. There's consequences.
- [07:57]
Dr. Susan Smith
There is no safe dose of alcohol because alcohol affects the development of synapses of the brain. People who drink at an early age heavily have been shown to have significantly smaller brains and reduced cognitive ability.
- [08:07]
Dr. David Nutt
They can now see and not have to wait till autopsy studies the gray matter. The actual neurons that are the structure of the brain shrink. You know, you've probably heard, oh, you're killing brain cells. Well, you actually are. A recent study, however, finally addressed the question of whether or not low to moderate amounts of alcohol consumption can cause brain degeneration. What they found was that even for people that were drinking low to moderate amounts of alcohol, so one or two drinks per day, there was evidence of thinning of the neocortex. So loss of neurons in the neocortex and other brain regions.
- [08:41]
Neuroscientist
Binge drinking definitely kills brain cells. It alters neural communication in such a way that it can change the structure and the function of the brain for a long term. Anytime you binge drink, you're going to alter the brain probably permanently. The plasticity can help it recover. But the more you do this, the less likely you are to be able to sort of overcome those perturbations.
- [09:10]
Dr. David Nutt
If people are ingesting alcohol chronically, even if it's not every night, there are well recognized changes in neural circuits, There are well recognized changes in neurochemistry within the brain, and there are well recognized changes in the brain to body stress system that generally point in three Directions increased stress when people are not drinking, diminished mood and feelings of well being when people are not drinking. And as you'll soon learn, changes in the neural circuitry that cause people to want to drink even more in order to get just back to baseline or the place that they were in terms of their stress modulation and in terms of their feelings of mood before they ever started drinking in the first place.
- [09:51]
Dr. Mark Bellis
And this is where alcohol is a really clever drug. Alcohol is a very promiscuous, your struggle. It gets into the brain and it changes all the good neurotransmitters that you want to change. You know, a bit of endorphins, bit of serotonin, bit of gaba. You know, it's a, it's a really clever drug and gradually it sort of eats, it worms its way into you. So eventually it kind of takes over and you get to the situation like, you know, that you described. And you know, I've had patients of mine who said they just find themselves drink, they don't even intend to drink, they're just suddenly there drinking. They don't know how they got there, they didn't want to do it, they even enjoy it very much, but they can't stop, it becomes a compulsion.
- [10:28]
Dr. David Nutt
So there's an increase in dopamine and an increase in serotonin. So it's kind of an increase in well being, an increase in mood, but it's a very short lived increase very soon after. And actually triggered by that increase is a long and slow reduction in dopamine and serotonin and related molecules in circuits. What you're getting is a blip of feel good followed by a long slow arc of feeling not so great. Which is why typically people will drink again and again across, across the night. And many people make the mistake of then going and pursuing the dopamine, evoking the dopamine releasing activity or substance, again thinking mistakenly that it's going to bring up their baseline, it's going to give them that peak again. Not only does it not give them a peak, their baseline gets lower and lower because they're depleting dopamine more and more and more. And we've seen this over and over again. When people get addicted to something, then they're not achieving much pleasure at all. Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. So oftentimes what will happen is the person only has excitement and can achieve dopamine release to the same extent, doing that behavior and not other behaviors. And so they start losing interest in relationships. They start losing interest in fitness and well being and depletes their life. And eventually what typically happens is they will stop getting dopamine release from that activity as well. And then they drop into a pretty serious depression. And this can get very severe and people commit suicide from these sorts of patterns of activity.
- [11:51]
Neurologist
But alcohol has effects in lots of different areas of the brain. Not just that sort of reward area, but it's also involved in a range of other neurotransmitters beyond dopamine. So you know things like glutamate and GABA and other parts of the brain. The hippocampus, which is involved in memory, the cerebellum, which is the back part of your brain that's involved in motor coordination. And likewise, when someone is alcohol dependent, it is one of the most destructive brain drugs to various parts of your of your body and different organ systems. Worst case scenarios can be things like alcohol related dementia or delirium, which are serious brain problems. Or cirrhosis would be another really major problem. These are things that people become extremely ill and need to go into a nursing home or people just die from.
- [12:42]
Dr. Susan Smith
Because alcohol is sort of this, this very generic drug. It's the most widely acting substance I know of. It acts on prote in every bottom body system, not just the brain, but on the kidneys, on the liver, you name it, it acts there. And so it's a pharmacological hand grenade because it indiscriminately can alter the function of proteins in cells everywhere in your body. Alcohol causes depression, it causes the opposite. It doesn't relieve anxiety, it causes anxiety. If the main thing in your internal or external world is a negative thing, alcohol will exaggerate that content.
- [13:14]
Dr. David Nutt
People who ingest alcohol, alcohol at any amount are inducing a disruption in the so called gut microbiome. The trillions of little microbacteria that take resident in your gut and that live inside you all the time and that help support your immune system and that literally signal by way of electrical signals and chemical signals to your brain to increase the release of things like serotonin and dopamine and regulate your mood generally in positive ways. Well, alcohol really disrupts those bacteria, alcohol kills bacteria and it is indiscriminate with respect to which bacteria it kills. So when we ingest alcohol and it goes into our gut, it kills a lot of the healthy gut microbiome. At the same time, the metabolism of alcohol in the liver, which you now understand, that pathway involving nad acetyl, acetaldehyde and acetate that Pathway is pro inflammatory, so it's increasing the release of inflammatory cytokines. All these pro inflammatory molecules, those are being released. You've now got disruption of the gut microbiota. As a consequence, the lining of the gut is, is disrupted and you develop at least transiently leaky gut. That is bacteria that exist in the gut, which are bad bacteria, can now pass out of the gut into the bloodstream. So you've got bad bacteria from partially broken down food moving out of the gut. The good bacteria in the gut have been killed. And so now you've got leaks in the gut wall, you've got the release of this bad bacteria. You've got inflammatory cytokines and other things being released from the liver and they are able to get into the brain through neuro, what's called a neuroimmune signaling. The net effect of this is actually to disrupt the neural circuits that control regulation of alcohol intake. And the net effect of that is increased alcohol consumption. So this is just terrible, right? I mean you take in something that disrupts two systems, the gut microbiota, and it disrupts in two ways. It's killing the good gut microbiota and it's allowing the bad bacteria to move from the gut into the bloodstream. You've also got pro inflammatory cytokines coming from the liver and those converge or arrive in the brain and create a system in which the neural circuits cause more drinking. That's a bad situation. And this is why people who drink regularly, even if it's not a ton of alcohol, what you end up with is a situation in which you have inflammation in multiple places in the brain and body and the desire to drink even more. And to further exacerbate that inflammation and the gut leaky ness. There was this conception that alcohol had some benefits with regards to some cardiovascular diseases.
- [15:37]
Addiction Counselor
More recent studies now find that that is probably not the case.
- [15:41]
Public Health Expert
You know, alcohol is one of the leading behavior related causes of health problems and deaths and also some social problems and economic costs, you know, ranging from things like injuries and accidents to cancers and actually heart and cardiovascular disease. So it causes a wide range of health effects. You know, when it comes to health, you know, less is more. I should mention that alcohol is actually considered a Class 1 carcinogen or cancer causing agent by the World Health Organization. So that's the same category as benzene and tobacco smoke. And some studies estimate that a drink of alcohol has about the same cancer causing potential as one to two cigarettes depending on your sex.
- [16:24]
Dr. Mark Bellis
In western cultures, alcohol is the most Harmful drug overall because it's the most harmful drug of society because it's the most widely used drug.
- [16:32]
Addiction Counselor
Yeah. And alcohol also makes people aggressive. It's the only drug we know that actually makes people aggressive. So you see a massive effect on crime rates because half the people who murder someone are drunk.
- [16:42]
Narrator
Oh, yeah.
- [16:43]
Addiction Counselor
And half the people who are murdered are drunk.
- [16:45]
Dr. Mark Bellis
No family in Britain, if you look at an extended family three generations in, which doesn't have someone who's been damaged by alcohol through addiction, through violence, traffic accidents, all, or being a victim because of someone else who was drunk and violence, almost every family in Britain is affected. But we don't own up to it. Right. We kind of push it under the carpet. You know, we know there's a problem, but we don't talk about it because, well, we don't know what to do about it. We're embarrassed. People are fearful of other drugs, illegal drugs, because it helps deflect their attention away from the problems of alcohol. Politicians love to get hysterical about a new drug because it means they can do something about drugs and they don't have to be held to account over their failure to deal with the problems of alcohol.
- [17:30]
Dr. David Nutt
Is drinking good for me in any way? For instance, many people have probably heard that resveratrol is good for people and that red wine is enriched in resveratrol. I hate to break it to you, but the reality is that if indeed resveratrol is good for us, and there's some debate about this, some people say strongly yes, some people say no. Other people say maybe the amount of red wine that one would have to drink in order to get enough resveratrol in order for it to be health promoting is so outrageously high that it would surely induce other negative effects that would offset the positive effects of resveratrol. No consumption. Zero consumption. Consumption of zero ounces of alcohol is going to be better for your health than low to moderate consumption of alcohol.
- [18:09]
Addiction Counselor
You do stupid things when you're drunk, you hurt yourself, you compromise your health. It's really hard on the people around you. You tend to turn into a liar and it screws up your life. Yeah, it's like. Yeah, but it's pretty fun. Yeah, well, it is, but you need something better than that. And what's better isn't being straight and not making mistakes. It's like, that's all prohibition in some sense. What's better is. No, you need an adventure, man. You need to get out there and have something to do.
- [18:34]
Dr. Mark Bellis
Yeah.
- [18:34]
Addiction Counselor
And something worth waking up for and you need. That's the substitute for the addiction.
- [18:39]
Recovery Advocate
This is why I don't like alcohol and this is why I don't like drugs. Because you're not in control. A substance is doing that. That right. But it's a good thing that you have this rage, because if we can take this 97 octane fuel and we put it in the right engine controlled. Oh, my gosh. So we need to make sure that high octane is controlled, because high octane in the wrong place can blow up a building.