Does adding vitamin C and minerals to alcohol make them a healthy beverage?

A new beverage industry is budding. Have you ever heard of alcohol or beer supplemented with vitamin C? Many beverage companies are trying to create alcoholic products but create a " healthy " and " healthy" feeling .

They remove sugar from the product, adding ingredients such as coconut water, electrolytes, vitamins, antioxidants, essences from acerola or damiana . Wine, beer or alcoholic drinks This was later advertised as being able to help you reduce stress, anxiety, enhance sexual ability and even be used by both athletes.

S&P Global's financial analysis predicts that the market for these "healthy" alcoholic beverages could explode strongly in the near future, doubling its value from $ 1.75 billion in 2019. to $ 3.5 billion by 2020.

Not too confusing. If alcohol becomes better, with less harm, more people will choose to drink them. But the question now is whether new products like beer fortified with vitamin C are really healthy. And what are the benefits of drinking them?

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Once you have alcohol, alcohol will harm you

The first thing to be clear about is that alcohol, beer, or alcoholic beverages in general will all affect your metabolism immediately and have long-term health effects. These effects come from the alcohol in it.

Whether you take vitamin C or reduce sugar from alcohol, beer or alcohol will still be an indispensable ingredient. Ethanol (the type of alcohol we drink) is a poison. Our bodies cannot use alcohol for any beneficial purpose. In contrast, alcohol interferes with important biochemical processes that help us live and thrive.

As soon as we drink ethanol on our bodies, our liver quickly breaks it down into less toxic chemicals, eventually excreting it out, explains Ryan Andrew, a dietitian at Precision Nutrition.

Ethanol is also a diuretic. It makes your kidneys work harder, drawing more water out of the blood. That's why you urinate more often when you drink alcohol, beer and why you usually wake up the next day with a bladder full of urine.

The process of eliminating ethanol is superior to all other metabolic processes, once you drink alcohol. This is because the body recognizes ethanol as a toxin that must be removed. It will delay other processes, such as using proteins to repair tissue and absorbing the vitamins and minerals in our food to eat.

Therefore, the nutrients in the food you eat at the drink will be absorbed less. And alcoholics are often malnourished, even though they eat a lot.

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Is there anything else that could be worse? Have! When you drink alcohol, beer, the degraded ethanol in your liver moves to the small intestine and large intestine, where most of the nutrients are absorbed.

Christina Lebonville, an ethanol researcher at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, says the metabolized ethanol can disrupt the intestinal flora, causing bad bacteria to grow stronger than good bacteria, increasing permeability of intestinal wall.

Over time, alcohol changes the lining of your intestines, making toxins more easily absorbed into your bloodstream. Alcohol, beer, and alcoholic beverages in general all increase your risk of developing many diseases including cancer, Mitch Lebonville said.

Therefore, we cannot have any healthy or healthy alcohol or beer, as long as they still contain alcohol. We cannot have such a drink, because the ethanol present in it has been a problem.

Can we add vitamins and minerals to offset the negative effects of alcohol?

Is not. Ethanol is ethanol, whether you drink it with chocolate or try to eat lots of green vegetables for vitamins is meaningless. " Vitamin C does not prevent the production of acetaldehyde [a byproduct of the breakdown of ethanol that causes you to get drunk], as well as the adverse metabolic effects of alcohol abuse ," said Professor Russell Turner at University of Oregon said.

A 2016 study found that drinking alcohol can affect your ability to absorb vitamin C. Therefore, adding vitamin C to alcohol and alcohol is not an effective idea.

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So does adding minerals or electrolytes to alcohol. Theoretically, electrolytes will prevent your body from becoming dehydrated during sweating. But the small amount of electrolytes found in alcoholic beverages will not make up for the loss of water that you lose through kidney elimination.

And you can't put a lot of electrolytes into alcohol, they will make your drinks salty. "I'm not sure I would choose this drink for heavy workouts every weekend ," Turner said. The nature of alcohol causes you to become dehydrated, so it will leave you exhausted.

In addition, any alcoholic beverage, whether added vitamins or minerals, will still make you drunk as usual. The hangover stems from the fact that ethanol is broken down into acetaldehyde and the process continues as usual in the presence of vitamins and minerals.

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A unique drunk reduction effect that beers can make is the removal of sulfite from their products. Sulfite is often added to preserve wine and can worsen hangover symptoms, especially headaches in people sensitive to sulfites.

However, it is estimated that only about 1% of the sulfite sensitive population can benefit from the manufacturer's removal of this ingredient from its alcohol. They themselves were more drunk than usual. People who are not sensitive to sulfites will feel the two wines are the same.

Alcohol can be part of a healthy overall lifestyle, but alcohol itself will never be a healthy drink

Brewing companies have a way to reduce the long-term effects of alcoholic beverages, which is to reduce the alcohol content in them. But reducing alcohol content would be pointless, if the original purpose of the drinking session was to drink until it was drunk.

The key to reducing the health effects of alcohol is that you have to consume less ethanol in your body. Then, drinking less also helps you gain the benefit of choosing a lower alcohol beer.

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Of course, no one can deny that drinking alcohol will bring joy, help strengthen social relationships and possibly enhance your mental health. But Andrew says there is a very thin line between promoting health and harming health.

Drinking more than one or two units of alcohol a day can impair nutrient absorption, increase the risk of health effects and lead to illness. Regardless of the type of alcohol you choose to advertise on, it is no better unless the alcohol content is lower, the alcohol will reduce the harm on the same consumption volume.

Therefore, alcohol products, alcoholic beverages fortified with vitamin C, antioxidants or minerals will not be a recipe for you to drink more to be healthier. Do not let yourself be turned into the prey of such advertising tricks.