Alcohol And Exercise

On Friday afternoon after you leave work, you probably think about going out and having a few drinks with friends to relax and wind down.  Even though you
may think you deserve to go out and have a few drinks, there are some things that you should certainly keep  in mind.

Like any other day, tomorrow is going to be a day for exercise, and since you are exercising on a regular basis, a few drinks of alcohol won’t really
hurt anything, right?  Before you decide to rush out to the local bar, there are a few things below that you should think about before you make your choice about going out to drink some alcohol.

Research has proven that even small amounts of alcohol with increase muscular endurance and the output of strength, although these types of benefits are very short lived.  After 20 minutes or so, the problems will begin to surface.  All of the negative side effects associated with alcohol will easily outweigh any possible benefits that it can have. No matter how you look at it, alcohol is a poison that can really harm your body if you aren’t careful.

The negative side of alcohol can reduce your strength, endurance, aerobic capability, recovery time, ability to metabolize fat, and even your muscle growth as well.  Alcohol will also have an effect on your nervous system and brain.  If you use it long term, you can cause severe deterioration of your central nervous system.   Even with short term use, nerve muscle interaction can be reduced which will result in a loss of strength.

Once alcohol reaches the blood cells, it can and probably will damage them.  With alcohol users, inflammation of the muscle cells is a very common thing.  Over periods of time, some of these cells that have been damaged can die which will result in less functional muscle contractions.  Drinking alcohol will also leave you with more soreness of your muscles after you exercise, which means that it will take you a lot longer to recuperate.

Alcohol will also have many different effects on your heart and circulatory system as well.  When you drink any type of alcohol, you may begin to
see a reduction in your endurance capabilities. Anytime you drink, your heat loss will increase, due to the alcohol simulating your blood vessels
to dilate.  The loss in heat can cause your muscles to become quite cold, therefore become slower and weaker during your muscle contractions.

Drinking alcohol can also lead to digestive and nutrition problems as well.  Alcohol cause a  release of insulin that will increase the metabolism of glycogen, which spares fat and makes the loss of fat very hard.  Due to alcohol interfering with the absorption of several key nutrients, you
can also become anemic and deficient with B type vitamins.

Because your liver is the organ that detoxifies alcohol, the more you drink, the harder your liver has to work.  The extra stress alcohol places on your liver can cause serious damage and even destroy some of your liver cells.

Since alcohol is diuretic, drinking large amounts can put a lot of stress on your kidneys as well. During diuretic action, the hormones are secreted. This can lead to heightened water retention and no one who exercises will want this to happen.

If you must drink alcohol, you should do it in moderation and never drink before you exercise, as this will impair your balance, coordination, and also your judgement.  Think about your health and ow you exercise - and you may begin to look at things from a whole new prospective.

Overpromoted Cholesterol Drugs

The New York Time

Published: April 2, 2008

The news keeps getting worse for two heavily promoted cholesterol drugs, Vytorin and Zetia. These drugs were supposed to offer a valuable alternative to the older cholesterol- lowering agents known as statins, a class that includes Lipitor, Zocor and other drugs that not only reduce cholesterol but also reduce the risk of heart attacks. In clinical trial results released this week, the newer drugs failed to reach their main goal: slowing the growth of artery-clogging plaques ? a suggestion that they might not help ward off heart attacks.

It is distressingly late to be learning that these drugs may provide little or no benefit. They were approved on the basis of evidence that they reduce the level of so-called bad cholesterol in the blood. That data was taken as presumptive evidence that the drugs would reduce heart-attack risks. Despite this slim supporting data, vigorous promotion propelled them to combined sales of more than $5 billion last year, placing them among the world抯 top-selling drugs.

An analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the drugs captured 15.2 percent of the cholesterol- lowering market in this country, driven by an advertising campaign aimed at consumers and aggressive marketing to doctors. But they claimed only 3.4 percent of the market in Canada, where advertising to consumers is prohibited, Vytorin is unavailable and public programs restrict usage. These are drugs that became blockbusters thanks to marketing muscle, not scientific proof of effectiveness.

There are also justifiable concerns that Merck and Schering-Plough, the companies that make the drugs, may have sat on adverse data for more than a year lest their sales be undermined. In e-mail messages unearthed by Senate investigators, the lead scientist on the study warned that repeated delays in releasing the results made it look as if the company was trying to hide something.

In the clinical trial, 720 European patients with genes that cause abnormally high cholesterol levels were given either Vytorin, a combination pill that contains both Zetia and Zocor, or simply Zocor alone. As expected, the combination pill proved better than the statin alone at reducing the level of bad cholesterol. But to everyone’s surprise, Vytorin failed to slow the growth of fatty plaques in the arteries, and it may have even allowed greater growth than the statin did.

Vytorin and Zetia are clearly down, but not necessarily out. It remains possible, for example, that the reason Vytorin had little effect in reducing plaque was that most of these patients had been taking statins for years and their plaque had already been depleted to the point that Vytorin had little room to improve the situation. It is also possible, however, that Vytorin and Zetia are simply less effective than the statins. Other trials now under way may clarify Vytorin’s value in coming years. Meanwhile, heart experts are surely right that Vytorin and Zetia should be a last resort for patients who can’t get their cholesterol down any other way.