One more for the road, one less for fertility
By Melissa Bridge

Do you have a hangover? Are you off colour, nauseous, and feeling like crawling away to a dark place to hide? Did you go out for just one or two drinks and end up losing count? You aren't the only one.

It seems that binge drinking is a British habit and becoming increasingly common, with three out of ten people binge drinking regularly. Women in particular are drinking more than ever and women between twenty and thirty are drinking heavily, boozing nearly as much as men of this age. However men and women's bodies are different. Women are smaller and appear to be less able to tolerate alcohol, so women risk liver damage, digestive problems, threats to their fertility and sooner than men who binge drink. There is disturbing evidence that teenagers and younger children are also following the adults'lead and binge drinking too.
As with women, a smaller, lighter body can tolerate less alcohol and this puts them at serious risk of alcohol poisoning which can be fatal. Drinking alcohol can also interfere with the effectiveness of human growth hormone so youngsters under eighteen are threatening their physical development by abusing alcohol.

So what is binge drinking? A simple definition is that a binge involves drinking twice the daily recommended maximum alcohol intake in one session. The recommended maximum daily intake for women is two to three units and for men it is three to four units. A unit is a half pint of lager or beer, small glass of wine or a pub measure of spirits.

There are around six thousand alcohol related deaths each year in Britain. Lowering the overall intake of alcohol could reduce this but so could changing the way we drink. Doctors and other professionals involved in dealing with the effects of alcohol would like us to adopt a more continental style of alcohol consumption. It seems our European cousins drink about as much as we do but they drink more slowly, that is they spread their intake over a longer period of time and tend to drink with food. This seems to be a healthier way to use alcohol as binge drinking is much more damaging than drinking regularly.

Why is binge drinking more harmful than drinking the same amount over a longer period of time? Alcohol is a poison and the body can deal more effectively with this poison a little at a time rather than a large amount at once. Another reason is that binge drinkers are the ones who are most likely to be injured or involved in an accident, fall or fight while they are drunk. This may not be the most talked about effect of alcohol but a trip to the accident and emergency department of your local hospital on a Friday or Saturday night will show you quite how often alcohol is involved in serious accidents, even when you exclude drink driving. They are also more likely to suffer stroke, kidney disease, serious memory loss and breast cancer than regular drinkers. Drinking with a meal also protects drinkers from irritating their digestive and intestinal tract with alcohol.

Why we binge drink seems to be a complicated mixture of habit and culture. Alcohol and food are more closely linked on the continent; in this country, pubs have only been serving food in the last few decades. Even now getting a meal or snack in a pub is a hit and miss affair, we still see pubs as a place to go to drink. Amongst younger people a fashion has grown up for competitive drinking sessions, alcohol is relatively less expensive compared to ten or twenty years ago and people have more disposable income. Happy hours and limited drinking time, Alco Pops and expensive soft drinks probably all share the blame for our hard drinking culture.

To help the body to heal some of the harmful effects of alcohol there are a number of herbal and homeopathic treatments available. If you feel you are binge drinking there are several ways that you can help yourself to control your alcohol consumption but also to reduce some of the harmful effects of alcohol. The kudzu vine, a herb used in Chinese herbal medicine, had considerable success in helping heavy drinkers reduce their intake without difficulty, a recent study has found.

It is not known how the herb works, but drinkers who tested the product reported that they drank less and felt more alert, calm and energetic than before the trial. What may be most helpful to binge drinkers is that the drinkers who took part in a trial of this herb, claimed to feel more relaxed and less stressed, so they did not crave alcohol and felt more able to control their intake.

A herbal practitioner may recommend Milk Thistle to support liver function and acidophilus bifidus can help relieve digestive irritation by encouraging the growth of useful gut bacteria. Homeopathic remedies include capsicum to reduce the side effects of controlling alcohol intake and a qualified homeopath will prescribe remedies designed for individual symptoms.
If you have already tried to control your binging without success, you may want to consider Auricular Acupuncture. This is a form of Chinese acupuncture that sees the ear as the switchboard to the brain, with various points on the ear relating to different parts of the body. These points are stimulated with needles or laser light to gently encourage the body to heal itself. Auricular Acupuncture is particularly recommended for the treatment of chronic conditions including over use of alcohol.

One of the symptoms of a hangover is a feeling of guilt and regret. In part this is due to the effects of alcohol. It is a depressant and in quantity can make people morose, but it is also because binge drinkers donÕt usually set out to get drunk, they simply lose the ability to stop drinking. Experts in the study of addiction believe that all addictions are both physical and psychological so if you want to reduce your binge drinking, then you need to change your habits and thought patterns, as well as helping your body to deal with alcohol withdrawal.

There are several ways of helping your will- power. First you need to think about who to tell and who not to tell, that you are trying to control your drinking. While you may need to talk to your partner about this issue and get his or her support, there are those people who seem to see it as a challenge as soon as anyone says they are giving something up and will try to get you to break your resolutions. Perhaps those people are best avoided altogether. After that it is down to you. If you struggle to cut down, consider a course of hypnotherapy, which has been shown to work well for reducing drinking. You may well find that having someone on your side will help and all forms of 'talking cures'; counselling and support groups for example may be useful.

If you want to give yourself a flying start to give up those binges, why not think about detox? Particularly after Christmas, when your system is not only stressed by alcohol but also trying to expel the toxins from all that rich, fatty, sugary food. A period of detoxification may make you feel better in body and spirit. You can do this at home or if you feel you want to treat yourself, there are health spas that offer de-tox too. It is important to maintain fluid intake, particularly if you are dehydrated from drinking too much alcohol. Get some advice from a qualified herbalist or other naturopath before you start on what to take to help your liver cleanse itself. Total fasts are not normally recommended and should only be carried out with professional supervision, but a fruit or vegetable fast is usually thought to beneficial to the body. Why not try it out? It is a good way to boost body and spirit and get in control of that drinking!