How Alcohol Affects The Brain And The Spinal Cord

We can also paraphrase this topic as "How Alcohol Affects The Central Nervous System".The CNS includes the brain and the spinal cord. The most important parts of the CNS are protected by bones. The skull protects the brain and the spine protects the spinal cord.

The nervous system is made up of the CNS and the peripheral nervous system (PNS). The PNS includes the neurons, or nerves, that form a network that carries information to and from the neck and arms, trunk, legs, skeletal muscles, and internal organs. Neurons can send nerve signals to and from the brain at up to 200 miles per hour. When the nervous system is working smoothly, it is amazingly efficient.

How Alcohol Affects The Digestive System

The digestive system is where food is broken down, or digested. Its organs include the mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, rectum, and anus. The mouth, stomach, and the lining of the small intestine contain tiny glands that produce juices to help digest food. The liver and the pancreas also produce digestive juices that reach the intestine and help the process of digestion.
Alcohol is not digested like other foods. Once alcohol is swallowed, it travels down the esophagus into the stomach and the small intestine. It avoids the normal digestive process and goes right into the bloodstream. About 20 percent of the alcohol consumed is absorbed in the stomach, and about 80 percent is absorbed in the small intestine.

One organ that is particularly affected by alcohol is the liver because it is the main organ that processes alcohol. The liver weighs more than three pounds and is the largest organ in the body. One of the liver’s main jobs is to get rid of poisons—like alcohol—that enter the body. Without the liver, you could not live.
Heavy drinking over a period of years can damage the liver. Some of this damage comes from free radicals, a group of molecules that are highly reactive. These molecules can attack the nearest stable molecule, leading to a dangerous chain reaction that can result in a disease called cirrhosis of the liver. Cirrhosis occurs when scar tissue replaces normal, healthy tissue and the liver, which needs unrestricted blood flow, doesn’t work as it should.

Food Value Of Alcohol

Now it is clear that if alcohol is a food, it will be found to contain one or more of these substances. There must be in it either the nitrogenous elements found chiefly in meats, eggs, milk, vegetables and seeds, out of which animal tissue is built and waste repaired or the carbonaceous elements found in fat, starch and sugar, in the consumption of which heat and force are evolved.

"The distinctness of these groups of foods," says Dr. Hunt, "and their relations to the tissue-producing and heat-evolving capacities of man, are so definite and so confirmed by experiments on animals and by manifold tests of scientific, physiological and clinical experience, that no attempt to discard the classification has prevailed. To draw so straight a line of demarcation as to limit the one entirely to tissue or cell production and the other to heat and force production through ordinary combustion and to deny any power of interchangeability under special demands or amid defective supply of one variety is, indeed, untenable. This does not in the least invalidate the fact that we are able to use these as ascertained landmarks".