Happy new year! We had a great time celebrating New Year’s Eve and glasses of alcohol were a must. Only the next morning you have terrible problems with your intestines. Those visits to the toilet don’t make you happy either. What alcohol does to you.
Alcohol and your body
Breaking down a glass of alcohol takes forever. On average, about an hour and a half of poop, while the breakdown products can still be found in your urine for two to five days. It is now known that alcohol can damage your body and mental health. There is also a clear difference between short-term and long-term alcohol use. For example, you might suffer from nausea and stomach complaints in the short term, but in the long term you could actually cause damage to the organs.
Issues
As soon as you drink, the drink comes into contact with different parts of the gastrointestinal tract. Think of the mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine and liver. It can therefore also cause problems in various places. Alcohol weakens the muscle that keeps the stomach closed, so the risk of heartburn is greater. Your stomach may also become irritated and you may vomit at some point. A balance of sugars and bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract can also be disrupted and this causes a bloated feeling.
Alcohol can lead to reduced absorption of certain nutritional values, including liquids. If you are healthy, your stool should be a solid mess of everything you have eaten and drunk. This is ensured by bacteria that regulate the intestines. Alcohol can disrupt the balance in your intestines and this can lead to looser stools. In other words: diarrhea. Of course we don’t want this.
Drinks
But does wine or beer have more influence? There are no specific drinks that cause intestinal problems. The effects mainly depend on the number of glasses you drink. Within ten minutes the drink would already be absorbed in your small intestine. This does not mean that you have to immediately run to the toilet, but know that this can happen within that amount of time. Some people do this a little faster than others. So if you know that you have sensitive intestines, you better pay more attention here, because before you know it you will be sitting on the toilet all evening. Of course we want to prevent this.
