Spokane bars: How alcohol is detrimental to your health and weight loss.

Everyone likes to have a good time, especially on a Friday night after a long, hard week. We all need to find time to relax, and going to a Spokane bar is an easy way to burn off steam, but do you know what those yummy, sweet drinks are doing to your brain, organs, and waist line? Bars in Spokane are helping you get fatter.

The ingredient that gives you that relaxed, uninhibited feeling is ethanol, which comes from fermented grains. From the moment you swallow, it is treated differently than anything else you ingest. It soaks through your stomach lining faster than other foods and drinks, and goes right to your liver. Your liver can only handle so much alcohol, so what is left over makes a bee line right for your brain. How quickly you feel “buzzed” may depend on how much or how little food you have in your stomach as well.

Spokane Bars: How does your body react to alcohol?

Alcohol first affects the brain’s frontal lobes, the reasoning centers, sedating the inhibitory nerves. The more you drink the more of your brain cells you kill. Higher levels of alcohol then affect the centers of speech, vision, motor control and eventually consciousness. But it affects the rest of your body, too. In your stomach, it causes gastritis (inflammation) and can lead to stomach ulcers. Excessive drinking can lead to cirrhosis of the liver (irreversible scarring of the liver).

Depending upon body size, it can take one to two hours to metabolize one drink. A 12-ounce beer; 4 ounces of wine and 1.5 ounces of hard liquor each contain about .5 ounce of alcohol, approximately the amount your body is capable of processing in one hour. More than that, and you move out of the “buzzed” feeling and into “drunk.”

Spokane Bars: Caloric Content.

Alcohol is a highly concentrated source of calories containing 7 calories per gram (compared to 4 cals/g for protein and carbohydrates and 9 cal/g for fat). These calories are utilized by the body mainly for heat production and are not converted to glycogen, the main fuel for muscle activity. And when you add it to sweet, sugary, and creamy drinks, the calorie content shoots through the roof. And in general, most people tend to eat mindlessly while drinking, so you really have no idea how many calories you are consuming.

If you are going to go to bars in Spokane, limit your alcohol intake, and alternate those adult beverages with soft drinks, preferably water to help offset the dehydration that is cause by alcohol. And pay attention to what you eat!