Posts Tagged ‘alcohol’

Off the Wagon

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

I haven’t had a (proper) drink for nearly six weeks. This might seem like an April fool — but it isn’t, it’s the absolute truth. Not a single drop of alcohol has passed my lips since the 20th February. This was loosely based on a Lenten fast but, for various reasons, mainly connected with it not being a religious observance, I started 4 days late and I’ve decided that I’ll finish 3 days early to co-incide with the change of month. Even so, this is by far the longest period of abstinence I’ve had since I was about 16 — and it might seem particularly odd given the beery posts on this page and the publication in the new ‘Swan Supping’ (out today) of a Charlie Mackle authored article on ‘The Beer Diet’.

Part of the reason I did this was to try and prove the null hypothesis as they do in scientific experiments (or is it disprove, I’ll need to sort that out before I write up my MSc dissertation?). The hypothesis is that, according to the government propaganda, one should feel a whole lot better when  the evil drug of alcohol isn’t coursing through one’s veins. I think it takes about two weeks to absolutely remove all traces of alcohol so I’m completely free of it. Do I feel a whole lot better and healthier — no, not really.

My initial impression is that that there’s not much difference in health benefits between 2 days and a month off beer — you feel the same. Certain things are different, like sleeping patterns. It’s very easy to rely on drink to knock you out into a deep sleep but I’ve still snored and fallen asleep in front of Match of the Day while sober, though maybe not as much. I’ve lost nowhere near as much weight as I thought I’d do but I wonder if that’s because I’m more permanently hydrated — that I’m now carrying round a more even amount of water rather than dehydrating and rehydrating myself? However, there’s definitely a tendency to go for biscuits and similar to replace the alcohol-related calories. Just at the end of the five weeks I’ve noticed a few other minor niggles appear to reduce that had stayed constant during the abstinence so it may be that a really extended period has some benefits.

And one beneficial effect on me has been quite indisputable — blood pressure.  It has definitely come down. I just went to the doctors so they could record my proudly lower figure on their records, although it hadn’t been bad before then.

One valuable part of the experience is I’ve proved to my own satisfaction, and given evidence to anyone who’s sceptical, that I have no compulsion to have a drink — but I think I knew that anyway. Even so I was surprised how little I’ve been tempted. I think that may be largely due to the time of year — no big social occasions or beer gardens beckoning in the summer. Nevertheless, I’ve probably saved a lot of money and it can’t have done me any harm so I may well do it again next year — and I think I’ll certainly cut back on drinking out of habit.

But this afternoon I’m going to go out and enjoy myself and get pissed.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Beer | No Comments »

Charlie Brooker — A Little Bit of Politics

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Interesting article from Charlie Brooker on his attitude to drugs and their reporting. It’s quite a good example of his style, which I saw critiqued a little unfairly in the Radio Times recently which said he tended to go after obvious targets and then pull his punches but that, sadly, he was about the best around at what he did.

What tends to be disappointing about Brooker is that while he sometimes seems to be on the brink of concluding something very idiosyncratic, his conclusions always seem to return to re-inforce the type of liberal orthodoxy that has atrophied in the values of his audience of Guardian readers for about the last 30 years (the big irony is they still see themselves as daring and progressive when, in fact, they now really represent the forces of inertia and conservatism). Maybe Brooker really shares these views — exemplified, for example, in the flawed logic that sees alcohol equated as an inherently more dangerous drug than many prohibited substances. (Of course it can be but most people don’t misuse it.) Yet even if he has leanings this way then his points would still be better made if he didn’t back so timidly away from questioning so many sacred cows — it’s almost like he has a little Ben Elton of the nauseous 80s sparking suit vintage (not the current sell-out Queen musical writer) barking inside his conscience.

Brooker seems pathologically scared of making general points that might offend these ingrained prejudices even when his real strength — his surreal self-deprecation — demolishes brutally many pompous,New Labour sensibilities. In this article he humorously describes his less-than-satisfactory experiences taking banned drugs and makes some very good points about the questionable motivations of the many people who still glorify a completely irrelevant and anachronistic 60s counter-culture (if it ever existed): ‘I don’t want to get out of my head: that’s where I live’.

All great stuff but then he diverts into safer territory by making an analogy about delusion peddled in newspapers which seems calculated to play to the Guardian reader gallery. Of course then his predictable targets are the tabloids who print pictures of Lady Ga Ga (though plenty supposed quality papers do too). It would be nice for a change if he took on the sort of mood-altering newspapers that print a diet of self-mythologising cant  which re-inforces the moral smugness of their readership — fulfilling similar fundamental psychological needs in the same sort of manner as those who are just satisfied by seeing whether Lady Ga Ga’s managed to keep her knockers from falling out of her dress today.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Media | 1 Comment »

Lord Adonis — The Meek Face of Totalitarianism

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

According to the Sunday Telegraph, New Labour, in the hopefully unlikely eventuality that their pernicious blight be cast over the country again from May, is to abolish the House of Lords. One good thing about this is that they will presumably have to get rid from elected office their unelected legions of cronies, faceless bureaucrats and, of course, that barely human specimen of meretricious mendacity — Mandelson. (Maybe they will create a loophole by allowing the undead to continue to serve in unelected office?).

After this week I will be extremely happy to see the back of Lord Adonis — the unelected Transport Secretary whose background from Oxford university onwards is even more privileged and cloistered than that of Cameron and Osborne — he followed teaching at Oxford with journalism on the FT and the Observer and, unsurprisingly according to Wikipedia, hides away from the hoi-polloi in the New Labour ghetto of Islington. This technocrat academic has maybe been handed the transport brief as no politician who wanted a hope in hell of getting themselves elected would want to be an apologist for this government’s lamentable lack of delivery in this area — belatedly getting Crossrail started and finishing the St.Pancras Channel Tunnel link that was started by the Tories and very little else except the ultimate cheapskate innovation of getting us to drive on motorway hard shoulders.

In the last few days he’s announced (or been reported to be about to announce) three things that would keep me blogging for a month.

1) The route of the High Speed 2 rail line — with its bizarre combination of tunnelling through London up to Amersham and then despoliation of the Chilterns and Aylesbury Vale from there on.

2) His ludicrous and partisan siding with the BA bully boy management in the cabin crew dispute. Someone should whisper to this sheltered egghead that he’s actually in a government that’s supposed to represent organised labour. Maybe the title of the party is a bit too obvious for his large brain to notice. Perhaps someone from Unison should remind him in a traditional working class way of the history of his party.

3) The proposal reported in the Sunday Times to reduce the drink-drive alcohol limit to effectively zero. This proposal sums up the cynicism and headline-grabbing ethos of this rotten administration as it anyone who understands human nature (by definition not most New Labour ministers) could predict that this is likely to lead to more, not less, drunk driving.

My anger about all three of these points goes beyond normal politics. Were this a genuine party of the left, rather than a bunch of self-serving parasites in thrall to global capital, then I might have more patience with them. Yet what really galls me about Brown’s Labour is that they offend something very basic and fundamental about human nature — they are complete hypocrites. They fail in almost every test of competence of their own administration yet they take every opportunity to preach to us plebs about the error of our own ways and are forever trying to interfere and assign blame in the minatae of social life. (It’s no co-incidence that Brown’s character determines that he does the same in government and his disastrously over-complex economic policies.) This wouldn’t be so bad if they had any integrity themselves but they are obsessed with appearance and perception to the detriment of reality — forever passing laws that they fail to implement. In some respects it’s the behaviour of an arrogant, totalitarian elite — even if it is fronted by meek and nerdy Adonis types.

More detail on each point above anon.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 1 Comment »

A Welcome Report Against the Tide

Monday, March 8th, 2010

The tide of scare stories in the press about alcohol has been temporarily stemmed by reports, first mentioned in the Sunday Times, of a study in Boston (the US one) that suggested that alcohol isn’t actually as fattening as commonly assumed — for women anyway. Alcohol contains a lot of energy and it had been assumed that any excess in the body was converted into fat, as with any other foodstuff. However, it’s now hypothesised that regular drinkers’ livers process energy from alcohol in a more complex way than previously thought and that much excess energy is turned to heat, not fat. So the argument goes that alcohol is not as fattening as its calorie count might suggest.

A couple of pieces of anecdotal evidence might support this. One is that while there are many CAMRA types who have large beer bellies, they’re probably not as large as their calorie intake might lead one to believe. A moderately heavy ale drinker might drink twenty pints a week — at a couple of hundred calories a go that’s four thousand extra calories — almost the equivalent of two days worth of energy for an adult male — or about 15 Mars bars a week. Most drinkers in this category take a surprisingly long time — several years — to develop a belly. I’ve also been on an alcohol reduction drive recently and have expected the weight to fall off. Even allowing for my new found substitute of chocolate digestives, I’ve not seen my weight plummeting to the extent that the shortfall in calories might suggest. And also there are plenty of women wine drinkers, as the study suggests, who aren’t anorexics but don’t put on the vast amounts of extra weight that the calorie content alone of the wine might suggest.

However, I don’t subscribe to the point of view that’s current in some drinking circles that beer is entirely unfattening and it’s the fondness for curries and takeaways that it creates which is wholly responsible for bellies.

This article in the Daily Mail summarises the various healthy effects that have been scientifically proven for a number of drinks — from red wine to beer via Baileys, gin, cider and others. It has to be added that the overall negative health effects of alcohol aren’t included but these generally tend not to be pronounced at moderate levels anyway. Beer is revealed as being a particularly nutrient-rich drink, with four pints giving an adult’s complete daily intake of folate.  There’s even a study that purports to dismiss the causative effect of beer on large bellies.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Beer | No Comments »

Typical Biased BBC Reporting on Alcohol

Friday, January 29th, 2010

A reactionary friend and I had an e-mail conversation about how hypocritical it is for the media to bewail the calibre of politician we have. They are one of the main reasons why politicians have become discredited — it didn’t take too long for the spin doctors and interview coaches to teach politicians how to avoid the elephant traps the likes of Paxman and Humphreys set for them and how easy it is to manipulate lazy journalists into following a set agenda. In short we have politicians who evade and distort because we have a news media that is devious and generally lacking in ethics (see Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe).

There was a fantastic example of biased reporting which pushes a narrative set by politicians yesterday. The BBC website reported a fact that may astonish most people in this country –alcohol consumption per capita is going down – and going down quite rapidly. What the BBC report didn’t even mention was the figure for overall average consumption figure: down to 12.2 units per week in 2008 compared to 13.5 in 2006 (buried in a Reuters report). This is, according to my calculations, a 9.6% drop over two years. The BBC report described this as ‘slight’. In what other context would a 10% decrease be described as ‘slight’? I can guarantee that if the figures were the other way round and showed an increase of the same magnitude that there would be the lead story — ‘Alcohol consumption going up by 5% a year!!!!’

Instead the BBC deliberately broke down the figures by class to report that professionals were drinking more than the working class — 13.8 units — sensationalising the findings to suggest a growing crisis but not supporting this with evidence of any increase at all.

While this is a good news story that belies the general narrative that we are fast becoming a nation of drunks, the BBC was careful to conflate this with reports that drink related deaths are increasing.  Alcohol related deaths rose from 8,724 in 2007 to 9,031 in 2008 — now that’s an increase of 3.5% in a year — which is obviously something to be concerned about but is smaller than the slightly less than 5% fall (allowing for compounding) in average consumption. Was that 3.5% increase also reported as ‘slight’? No. It was used as the headline for the web page.

Moreover, the number of total deaths in 2008 according to the ONS is 509,090 which makes alcohol related deaths 1.7% of the total. Again, because these are avoidable then this is obviously way too many but I doubt a headline that says nearly 2% of people in the UK are killed by booze would grab so much attention. (I would guess the man or woman in the street would think it at least double or even quadruple that). However, at a steady rate of growth of 3.5% (compounded) it would take another 18 years for the number of alcohol related deaths to rise by 50%, which would be around 4% of the total number (making the assumption that all other trends continue).

At least the page later conceded that consumption had been falling since 2002 and because the deaths are largely concentrated in older people who have, almost by definition, been drinking for many years that the positive trend of lower consumption will take a similarly lengthy period of time to show in the mortality figures.

Of course a rise in alcohol related deaths is very bad news and should be reported but so should the facts that show that overall this country is getting more sober and in general taking a more sensible attitude to drinking, albeit there may be more extremes in number of genuine problem drinkers and a large number of teetotallers.

Yet the way the Department of Health and other lobby groups put out a drip feed of press released that are regurgitated by lazy journalists shows that the media is complicit in completely misrepresenting a positive story into scaremongering. We might expect some of the tabloid press to do this but for the BBC to be so complicit is quite shocking.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Beer | 1 Comment »

Units of Usefulness

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

Researching a special diet article I’m thinking of writing I came across a most useful tool on the Drinkaware website. It calculates both how many units and how many calories you’ve consumed from various alcoholic drinks. There are quite a number of named drinks to choose from and generic categories. It’s well worth a try. Click here to access.

 I’m fairly clued up about how many units are in an alcoholic drink (one of the very few in the country I suspect) but I’m a bit hazy on the calories, except there’s usually more than you think.

There’s even an option to keep a drinking diary. I wonder some people would publish that on Facebook? I wouldn’t register that sort of thing on line as I suspect the governement and BMA would hack into it and feed it straight through to my GP’s surgery. (I wonder if having the GPs berate you for admitting getting close to the 21 unit limit is a way of putting people off going to see the doctor and so relieve strain on the NHS?)

When I was about 25 my drinking mates and I did a similar thing using little pieces of card to keep the drinking diary. We probably under-recorded a bit as we mainly drank pints of around 5% and counted them as 2 units (they’re closer to 3). I usually trundled along at somewhat higher than the supposed danger limit but my colleagues often went into triple figures and it was a matter of pride who achieved the highest. A certain Kerryman managed well over 150 one week and that’s just the beer he could remember.

Of course, this goes to point out the ridiculously unscientific basis on which the guidelines are issues. An otherwise healthy, 6ft Gaelic football player in his twenties is not going to react the same way to an amount of alcohol as a 4ft 9in 80 year old grandmother. But that’s a different rant…

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Beer | No Comments »

Big People, Fight For Your Rights!

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Today outside the Mayor of London’s office there’s a demonstration against prejudice against obese people. I thought this might be more self-pitying, politically correct rubbish until I noted one of the protestors’ objectives: ‘protesters want the UK to follow San Francisco, where a law bans “fat-ism”…and stops doctors pressing patients to slim down’. Seeing as there’s far more of a causal effect between obesity and poor health than there is with alcohol, I’d fully support these radical ‘persons of size’ because that would set a precedent that would stop the constant lecturing of the likes of the BMA about the dangers of alcohol. There was yet another piece of dubious statistical interpretation released to the press today and all over Google News.

Tags: ,
Posted in Beer | 1 Comment »