I often hear doctors forbid people to eat sweets, coffee, alcohol for various diseases, they say it's all from the evil one🙂 Let's understand what from this list is from evil and what is not and why:
Let's start with sweets, i.e. fast carbohydrates, which are the easiest source of energy for body cells. If there are no metabolic diseases with high glucose (periodically more than 5.5 mmol/l in serum), you can have a sweet at least every day.
With low glucose in serum (~ less than 4 mmol/l) sweet even becomes a medicine. For example, symptoms of low glucose are spontaneous loss of consciousness (in thin girls it usually happens), frequent nightmares and waking up at night with a feeling of hunger.
I would also add that you should avoid fructose in its pure form, it leads to liver obesity (for example, laboratory rats are created such pathology by feeding fructose powder).
Speaking of coffee, the benefits here are as follows - ground coffee in the morning is a great way to increase intestinal peristalsis.
What is it? it is a contraction of the muscles around the intestines to speed up the passage of the contents. If you combine coffee with something fatty in the morning (like a French breakfast - bun with butter 🙂) then in addition to peristalsis you can increase bile flow. These two processes contribute to the excretion of "waste", in particular help detoxification (although there is an exception for people with Gilbert's syndrome).
Also the particles of coffee bean inside the intestines are an excellent "home" for beneficial bacteria, i.e. prebiotics. Therefore, it is important to drink ground coffee, not instant coffee!
It should also be remembered that in the production of coffee it is treated with all kinds of chemicals! Therefore, you should give preference to "major" brands of coffee.
Well for caffeine in coffee you know without me that it is a stimulant and you can't have too much of it or you will be twitchy.🙂
Bottom line, the only possible harm is in the caffeine and in the chemical processing during production.
Now for the fun part 🤪 Alcohol. I'm telling you right away there is no objective benefit here. You probably know that ethyl alcohol washes away grease, everyone probably washed the windows with similar in action means and saw how it happens 🙂
So, every cell in our body has fats (lipids) on the surface, and quite a lot of them. When drinking alcohol, the surface of the cells dissolve, and the closed structure of the cell is broken, it begins to get those substances that should not get in the norm. And it happens in all tissues (vasodilating effect is also from here).
But the most interesting processes occur in the brain. Alcohol removes the lipid layer from the membrane of neurons, just like some girls under it take off their clothes 😁
As a result, all sorts of neurotransmitters that control our behavior are released into the bodies of neurons. At low doses of alcohol it is dopamine (roughly speaking, the feeling of motivation), serotonin (roughly speaking, the feeling of joy and happiness), at high doses it is GABA or gamma-aminobutyric acid (lethargy).
And all this gives the very high for which people drink or God forbid booze. 🙂 The high is good once in a while, but it damages the nucleus of cells and the DNA in it too. So people who drink a lot create mutations in their DNA.
Bottom line, alcohol is harmful, damages cells and DNA, but this information is unlikely to make anyone give it up completely 😉
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21894674/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24698543/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35057580/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32575704/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24325083/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3526990/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8736996/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32132710/
