Resolutions - Is Alcohol *Actually* Healthy?
A cocktail with your friends, a glass of wine after work, a beer at a barbecue–alcohol is everywhere. Undoubtedly, it’s been an integral part of our society for thousands of years. But when it comes to its effects on our health, results can feel more mixed than your favorite margarita. Is alcohol a “poison,” or maybe, in moderation, is it actually ok, or even good for us?
Today, we speak to Professor Eric Rimm from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on the science of alcohol and health. So sit back, relax, and pour yourself a glass… or maybe don’t.
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Guest
Dr. Eric Rimm is a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research focuses on the effects of diet and lifestyle as they relate to chronic disease and obesity, which includes his work on micronutrients, whole grains, alcohol consumption, and polyphenols.
Academic Profile | Publications
Show Summary
3:21 - The history of alcohol and prohibition in the 1920’s
6:61 - When did the research start to indicate that alcohol was good or bad for us?
8:06 - What are the potential benefits of alcohol for longevity?
Ethanol in alcohol increases your good cholesterol and decreases blood clotting
12:06 - What compels people to drink or not to drink?
14:55 - Differences between drinkers and non-drinkers in the research
17:24 - Why is alcohol biologically considered a “poison”, but also seemingly causes health benefits?
17:57 - Tolerance and gendered difference in alcohol metabolization
18:00 - Where is alcohol metabolized?
19:50 - Why does your drinking pattern matter for overall health and what does this mean?
Based on government guidelines, drink in moderation which means one drink a day for women and 2 drinks a day for men.
21:25 - What defines binge drinking?
For men - 5 drinks
For women - 4 drinks
23:00 - Assessing the health risks versus health benefits of alcohol
29:32 - Effects of drinking on sleep and cultivating mindful awareness around how drinking makes you feel
32:38 - Drinking as excess calories
33:28 - Effects of drinking with a meal
37:44 - Alcohol and weight gain and the Freshman 15
38:41 - Alcohol and stress reduction
39:53 - If I don’t drink, should I start? If I do drink, should I cut back?
41:52 - The future of research on alcohol
43:30 - Alcohol portion sizes:
Spirit - 1.5 oz of 80 proof alcohols (40%)
Wine - 5 oz
Beer - 12 oz
45:48 - The bigger picture on alcohol
Studies and Articles
Alcohol Basics: Let’s Define a Drink
A gender-specific measure of binge drinking among college students.
The Effects of Alcohol on Quality of Sleep
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Juna [00:00:02] Eddie. Today is an episode that is guaranteed to keep you in the highest of spirits.
Eddie [00:00:08] Am I not always in the highest of spirits during our episodes?
Juna [00:00:11] Well, yes, but this one is extra special. It's buzzworthy. It's intoxicating, one might say.
Eddie [00:00:18] Juna, I feel like you're trying to lead us on to something here.
Juna [00:00:22] I'm trying to be the Eddie of the episode. I'm trying to have some some good jokes to tell you that today we are doing an episode on the alcohol. Shout out T-Pain.
Eddie [00:00:33] Oh, finally, an episode to justify that glass of wine with dinner. I've been waiting for this episode for ages.
Juna [00:00:38] On today's episode, in continuation of our Resolution series, we are tackling one of the most commonly made New Year's resolutions to give up alcohol. Is drinking alcohol. Good for us. Or should we save our money, kick the booze and live sober October year round. I'm Juna Gjata.
Eddie [00:00:57] And I'm Dr. Eddie Philips, associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Juna [00:01:01] And you're listening to Food, We need to Talk. The only podcast that has been scientifically proven to give you a buzz without any alcohol consumption just by listening. Before we start the episode, let's read one of our favorite reviews from this month. Eddie, Do you wanna do the honors?
Eddie [00:01:28] The title of this one is “Obsessed”. Well, from M Gonzo 68. "I am in love with this podcast. It's my absolute favorite. I need more. Bi-weekly is not enough. Weekly or more is a must for this one. Please. Please. Pretty please."
Juna [00:01:47] Like you're so good reading bedtime stories to your kids. I feel like you like. Do all the voices and stuff. Absolutely. Oh, my God. We should have Eddie do a storytime.
Eddie [00:01:55] Even after they fell asleep. Oh, my gosh. Just keep on going.
Juna [00:01:58] Oh, my God. Can we please for, like. I don't know, guys, we should have a special episode where Eddie reads us a book or something. Anyways, thank you so much. M Gonzo 68. Not sure exactly what your name is, but thank you.
Eddie [00:02:08] M Gonzo 68.
Juna [00:02:09] Yes, that's probably their name. And remember, guys, if you want your review read out on the show, you can leave us a five star rating and a review and there's a pretty good chance you'll be shared on the show. And it helps other people find the show, which we always appreciate. And now we will go straight into the episode.
Eric Rimm [00:02:27] Hi, everybody. Eric Rimm I'm a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Eddie [00:02:34] Welcome, Dr. Rimm. And I wanted to point out that this is changing up our usual modus operandi of sort of recording folks in advance. This is a live interview, and for the first time ever, our live interview is with a live person here in the studio.
Juna [00:02:51] Well, thus far in the studio.
Eric Rimm [00:02:53] It is a beautiful studio and has ample amounts of dark chocolate.
Eddie [00:02:58] Which we could get into.
Juna [00:03:00] Yeah, the peanut butter cups are the most important part of the show, guys. You never see those. But before you record, we have to have a peanut butter cup like a mini one. So anyways, today we have brought you here to talk about something so near and dear to so many people's hearts. We're going to talk about alcohol. So I want to start off, can we do a brief description of the history of alcohol? Because I'm sure it goes back a very long way.
Eric Rimm [00:03:21] The history of alcohol. Wow. I mean, how much time do we have? I mean, it does go back thousands of years. You know, people were fermenting things thousands of years ago and making beer. Then it turned into wine. And later on, people learned how to distill and make spirits. So it has been part of, you know, many cultures. I don't know how far back it goes. I mean, if you think about it, there was probably people walking, finding fermented fruit on trees and getting a buzz out of it because it was staying on the tree too long and fermenting and creating alcohol. I think that's probably the origins of how someone said, Hey, we should do this in a systematic way. This is pretty good stuff. So it really does go back thousands of years, though.
Eddie [00:04:04] And was it actually a sort of a safer way to get fluids? If you think about all of the water borne illnesses that may be not in alcohol.
Eric Rimm [00:04:13] Yeah. I mean, obviously alcohol would kill some of those things, but you got to be a little careful there because you could if you're really trying to get it as your only source of fluid, you.
Eddie [00:04:23] Wouldn't get past noon. Yeah.
Eric Rimm [00:04:25] Yeah exactly when get past noon and I'll if you be able to get enough fluid that way.
Juna [00:04:29] And so when we first see alcohol like ever kind of demonized was it during prohibition in the United States at least the first time it's been said to like, you know, don't drink this?
Eric Rimm [00:04:39] Yeah. I mean, I'm not a historian per se of alcohol across cultures, across the globe. But that clearly was a time where alcohol abuse had reached a point. And the powers that be, whether it be, you know, religion or other people came together and said, let's figure out how to get rid of this this problem. And, you know, obviously it goes back to Europe. It goes back to too many countries that pre-date U.S. where people were abusing it and using it and abusing it. So they tried that in the United States. They tried prohibition. That didn't work. So after a while. So there is a general desire and drive to have libations.
Eddie [00:05:20] And we lapse into brief historical notes on this show. So I just wanted to call up one here that prohibition actually went from 1920 to 1933. So it actually took an amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the 18th Amendment, to prohibit alcohol, and then the 21st Amendment. The only amendment that's actually ever been passed to repeal a prior one came out in 1933 and the alcohol started flowing again.
Eric Rimm [00:05:50] Well, thank you. I did not know that one. Thank you.
Eddie [00:05:53] Yeah, And it's always easy to remember the numbers 18 and 21, because when I grew up. When I grew up. Yeah. You only had to be 18 years old to drink and, Juna.
Juna [00:06:02] Yeah, you have to be 21, but not in Europe.
Eric Rimm [00:06:05] Yeah, right. When I grew up in Wisconsin, I was 18 when I was in college and it turned 21, but I was grandfathered in, so.
Juna [00:06:11] Wow.
[00:06:12] You know. Yeah, it was perfect timing. I was just the right age at the right time.
Juna [00:06:16] Amazing. So when did we first start to suspect any health benefits from alcohol? Like, when was the first kind of signs that it might be good for us or bad for us in terms of research?
Eric Rimm [00:06:27] Yeah, I think signs that it's bad for us came pretty early. I mean, I think in some of it's just, you know, keeping track of car accidents going, wow, you know, X percent of people are getting in car accidents in their twenties were had alcohol. So but those are like the acute, you know, bad effects. The benefits date back to the mid seventies and I think there was a there's always been the suggestion again sort of anecdotally like well that person you know you ask a hundred year old wow what do you you know, what do you attribute your long life to. Well, I have a drink, I do this, I don't smoke, I have a drink, I do whatever. So there's a lot of that sort of that came about. But it was Dr. Art Klatsky who was using the Kaiser Permanente Health Insurance database, and they had collected information from people back in the early seventies. And he had done, you know, hundreds of thousands of people that were part of Kaiser Permanente or over 100,000 people and followed them for five or six years. And they had this health care database that said, wow, look, people who are drinking in moderation have lower rates of heart attacks. And that was the first time someone really had done it in a large scale sort of classic epidemiology, where you're collecting things about their smoking patterns and their obesity, their physical activity. So you could say, is it really their alcohol or is it because they, you know, have more friends and have other things? And he was able to sort of tease it out. He wasn't, you know, wasn't the longest study and it wasn't a lot of other things. They didn't measure a lot of other things. Right. But was the first time someone said, you know, we need to look into this more. Is this real or is this just sort of an artifact of the population? And so since then, there has been a lot of studies that have looked at both the risks and benefits of of alcohol consumption.
Juna [00:08:06] Right. I was going to say, do we know what mechanism is behind those longevity benefits or was it just kind of speculation.
Eric Rimm [00:08:16] At the time? We did not. Since then, yes, there have been many, many dozens, almost 100 studies that where they randomized people to alcohol. I mean, can you imagine? That's how we know to take statins. We take statins because they've done these huge randomized trials or they give person a statin or give them a placebo. It's really hard to give someone a placebo in an alcohol trial. But what they do is sort of randomize the same person to two drinks a day and tell them to drink it before they go to bed at night. And then, you know, four weeks later, you say, okay, instead, have whatever water, have grapefruits, have something that does not have alcohol. And in a relatively short period of time, you can see someone's good cholesterol go up. You can see their blood's propensity to clot go down. So a heart attack is, you know, ultimately caused by a blood clot in your arteries. So if you have something that reduces clotting, you know, like alcohol, it can be beneficial and also seems to do something with beneficial to your your glucose control, either because it increases your heart rate a little bit so you're burning glucose or because it slows the absorption of food. But those are the main things that we've studied from these experimental studies. It really suggests that, again, in moderation, you know, at a sort of pattern, that it's a healthy pattern. You do see benefits.
Eddie [00:09:34] And the benefit is coming from the alcohol itself as opposed to what it's packaged in?
Eric Rimm [00:09:41] Yeah, that's I mean, that's the that's a really a tricky question. Like you think about, you know, different drinks have different calories or when you have rum, usually have it with coke. So, you know, what about that 80 calories you're getting from Coca Cola? You know, So I think you really have to think about, first of all, what are you drinking and how fast you're drinking it? Mm hmm. And then, I mean, there have been these experimental studies where they feed people grain alcohol. So it's like it's not wine, beer or, you know, or a vodka. It's like high intensity alcohol that's like mixed with, you know, a juice or something like that. And in all of those studies, you see good cholesterol going up and you see blood clotting going down. So, you know, we think in the long term. It probably doesn't make any difference is probably much more important about the drinking pattern. So, yes, people say, oh, what is wine better? I mean, red wine does have a little bit of polyphenols, but in the big scheme of things, you think about all the other polyphenols in your diet fruits, vegetables, dark chocolate, tea, apples in all these places that you get polyphenols. Having one or two glasses of red wine, you may increase your polyphenols by 5% or 8%, but it's not going to suddenly be the be all and end all, which is. But ethanol, the ethanol part really is the thing that's most powerful for increasing your good cholesterol and decreasing your blood clotting.
Eddie [00:10:55] The first time I really heard this was from you, and I was at the Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives Course, which is sponsored by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and it's held at the Culinary Institute of America out in Napa Valley. And the setting was as you were giving.
Juna [00:11:14] Yeah.
Eddie [00:11:15] Oh, yes. It's it's.
Eric Rimm [00:11:17] Just meeting as hard as you think.
Juna [00:11:19] You guys aren't going for a conference.
Eddie [00:11:20] Well, I'll tell you the rest of the story now. So Dr. Rimm gives this wonderful lecture. About the benefits of alcohol.
Eric Rimm [00:11:31] Risk and benefits.
Eddie [00:11:32] Okay.
Eric Rimm [00:11:33] I got to be fair.
Eddie [00:11:34] Okay. The risks and benefits and my first text are my wife is listening to the literature that was being reported is I don't drink enough. That there was something that because I don't drink very much at all and I and I listen to this, I thought for me, the benefits are going to outweigh the risks. The next thing that I learned because you were paired with a sommelier. Did I say that right? You did okay. Yeah. The sommelier was leading us, as were you in a wine tasting in the midst of this lecture. And the wine was good and expensive wine.
Eric Rimm [00:12:05] Yeah.
Eddie [00:12:06] And I had previously said that I don't like wine, and I tasted these $100 bottles of wine. And then I wrote my next text to my wife saying, Sweetheart, remember I said, I don't like wine. I realize I don't like cheap wine. So this sort of brings up a question about just the pleasures of alcohol. Like what is it that compels us to drink? Is it?
Juna [00:12:29] Guys? I just want to say I don't get it. I do not like alcohol. And I love cocktails. I would like a cocktail even better. Minus alcohol. So I like the sugar. Oh, okay. Yeah. So? So, yeah, please do illuminate.
Eric Rimm [00:12:42] Well, you know, this is a great contrast. This is you know, this is why I think the national guidelines are not everybody should drink because clearly everybody should not drink. Some people don't like the feeling of having a drink. Some people, you know, they genetically people metabolize alcohol differently. Some people flush as soon as they have alcohol, those people probably shouldn't drink. It doesn't make them feel comfortable. If it doesn't make you feel good, you shouldn't feel the obligation or the peer pressure. There's a lot of other things you can do to stay healthy. One of them is to exercise, I've been told. It's I mean, you can eat healthy. You can there's a lot of things you can do. Alcohol can be part of it. So I wouldn't. I mean, it's nice for talking about alcohol in health, but I wouldn't choose alcohol necessarily. The primary reason I started of yes, I'm going to go be healthy today. No, it should be because you like the you know, ethanol metabolizes. It gets into your bloodstream. It goes into your brain. You know, it hits a number of sensor things. It makes you feel more comfortable. It makes you feel. Everybody knows, you know, that's how you it's easier to meet people when you're in college if you've had one drink or two drinks. And if you're shy and nervous and standing in the corner. So there's a lot of behavioral factors that go along with drinking. And I think that's what I wish our country would learn how to drink in a healthier way. And I don't mean, you know, drinking a bottle of wine versus a six dollar bottle wine. I mean that if, you know, you know, we kind of know we should know when to stop. We should do it in a moderate way. We should do it with food. There's a lot of things about drinking patterns which are probably almost more important than telling people to have, you know, vodka, beer or wine. And, you know, I think, as you said earlier, a lot of European countries don't have an age limit and people kind of start earlier on and learn how to drink healthy if their family drinks healthy because they have it at a meal in the evening. So there's a lot to learn. And I think if you clearly don't like the feeling of alcohol, then, you know, stick with the virgin margarita or something like that, which is all the margarita stuff without it. I mean, it does have calories. I think that's the biggest thing that we have to remember about most drinks is that they have 100 and 150 calories depending on what you're drinking.
Juna [00:14:47] So that's another thing I was going to ask you. So I guess there's a couple of directions to go in, but there's too many things I want to talk about.
Eric Rimm [00:14:53] Okay, I'm here. Let's do.
Juna [00:14:55] It. So first of all, these studies that first came out in 1970 and just go back to those for second, part of the reason why they were an overestimation of the effects of alcohol has on heart disease is because of the nondrinkers in these studies. A lot of them were nondrinkers for like not the healthiest reasons. It wasn't just healthy people deciding not to drink, right?
Eric Rimm [00:15:13] Oh, you've been doing your homework.
Eddie [00:15:14] I like this.
Juna [00:15:15] You always have to look at like this group, right? So can you kind of explain why those original studies were an overestimation of the effect alcohol has on heart disease?
Eric Rimm [00:15:23] Yeah, I don't you know, I'm not completely sure they were an overestimation. I think there there there has been a concern and there still is a concern when you do, let's say, 100,000 people in the study and you send them a questionnaire and you collect all this information about them, which we have done with four or 500,000 people with our research group at Harvard, and you collect all this information. There's no question that in any given time nondrinkers are different than drinkers, right? So I'd like to compare them and say, okay, you know, moderate drinkers have lower rates of heart disease than nondrinkers, but we know why does a 40 or 50 year old not drink? Some of the reason is because, like you said, it doesn't make me feel good. They haven't consumed alcohol their whole life. Some of it is that they drink way too much. Their doctor says you have high blood pressure because drinking too much causes hypertension. So they stopped drinking. So the nondrinkers are actually some of them are at higher risk of having a heart attack because they've been drinking way too much for 30 years and have high blood pressure and diabetes. And they stopped drinking because they're sick. So that is the sequitur hypothesis. So a certain percentage of nondrinkers truly have higher rates of heart disease. So if you compare them to anything, it's going to look like, oh, drinking is better. Not because it's drinking, it's just because you're comparing it to people with who are already sick. So we have done a number of studies where we've tried to tease out every possible thing to sort of get rid of all, you know, get rid of all the people that are sick, quitters. Then what do you see? And you still see benefit. We even looked at the healthiest group. Like we said, people who are not overweight, people who exercise and people have a good diet. And we went from 50,000 people in our study down to 4000. So we got rid of like 80, 85 or 90% of the population. And even in those 4000 people we looked at, if you drink or don't drink, what happens? The drinkers had lower rates of heart attacks even in like the healthiest of the healthy, so that it's still not a perfect study. It's still not like a long term clinical trial where you're flipping a coin and giving some people alcohol and some people not alcohol. But, you know, a number of different studies have looked at it this way. And plus we have the experimental evidence that biologically we know what happens if you give people alcohol for a month or two.
Juna [00:17:24] Can you explain biologically, we kind of covered it, but can you also explain, like how alcohol's metabolized and why do people say that alcohol is literally a poison that is treated by your liver as a poison? But then we see all these like health benefits from alcoholics? Kind of counterintuitive.
Eric Rimm [00:17:37] Yeah, I know it is. It's it's kind of a double edged sword. There's no question that your body reacts to alcohol as if it is a toxin. And some of the enzymes that break down alcohol actually break down other toxins. So there's no question that there are issues, which is why in sometimes if you drink moderately and you start drinking more, your liver makes more of those enzymes because it says, Oh, this guy's a drinker, I got to be prepared for these toxins. They're coming in. So, I mean, and conversely, if you don't drink for two months and you go back to it, your liver loses the capacity to metabolize some of that alcohol. So you actually feel more of the alcohol effects if you don't drink for two weeks. Yeah, it's a tolerance thing. And so, I mean, it is true that most of the alcohol gets metabolized in your liver. Some of it gets metabolized in your stomach. Unfortunately, only among men. The men have this enzyme in their stomach that breaks down about 5% of alcohol. Women don't have that enzyme in their stomach. So for a given, you know, equal sized person, a woman's going to get a bit more of a buzz from having a drink than a man.
Juna [00:18:38] I thought it it's just a size thing. I mean.
Eric Rimm [00:18:39] Some of it size and, you know, body water and some of it is actually the alcohol dehydrogenase. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of unfair in evolution. Why has evolution done that? I have no idea. Maybe men used to eat more fermented grapes? Yeah, It's the.
Juna [00:18:53] Add it to the list of grievances that I have against evolution.
Eric Rimm [00:18:54] So. So most of the alcohol gets metabolized in your liver. Some of it small bit gets metabolized in your lungs, which is why breathalyzers work. Oh, because it's a very small percentage, but it's the same in everybody. So they can measure the alcohol metabolites when you breathe into something. So that's kind of cool. I learned that a couple of years ago that some of the alcohol is actually metabolized by your microbiome. Your microbiome has some of the same enzymes that your liver does to break down alcohol. It's not appreciable, but there is some that, you know, there's enzymes everywhere, I guess is because alcohol's it is somewhat of a toxin. So I think that's why drinking pattern is so important. It's, you know, the obvious thing that everybody always jokes about. It's like, oh, I have 1 to 2 drinks a day on average. That means I have seven on Friday and seven on Saturday. No, that's not that doesn't count. That is you know, that causes more toxins in your body than sort of spacing it out over the course of the week.
Eddie [00:19:43] So it's that it brings up a question, when were I didn't want to use this word recommending or thinking about how much someone drinks. You're alluding to drinking pattern versus sort of total alcohol consumption in a week.
Eric Rimm [00:19:59] Yeah, I think it's interesting. If you look back at the U.S. dietary guidelines, which I guarantee, no one does, but I mean, they're written.
Juna [00:20:06] On this.
Eddie [00:20:07] Where we have.
Juna [00:20:08] Looked back at old.
Eric Rimm [00:20:09] Oh, okay. And corrected. Well, of course, if you go back I mean, the first guidelines were written in 1980, and they have been published every five years. They get a bunch of scientists together and they decide on something and then they tell the government, here's what we think. And then the government writes the guidelines. I got to do this in 2010. It was a great privilege. I got to write the alcohol section. But the guidelines for alcohol are the thing that have been the most stable over the last 40 years, and it's just a sort of different way of wording it. Every time, you know, it says, you know, if you like to drink and then you can, you know, do so in moderation, which is up to two drinks a day for men and up to one drink a day for women. And then all the exceptions are, you know, unless you are driving a vehicle, unless you don't like alcohol, then you have a disease and all the other things that you know, which are swimming. If you're doing things that you should, you know where you shouldn't be drinking. But it is I mean, it is safe to drink up to two. And that's what our most recent guidelines, it's like, well, they wanted to tame it back a little bit because they're worried about overconsumption, but it still says sort of up to two per day for men and up to one per day for women. And it doesn't say obviously collect them all and have them on Friday and Saturday because I think. Right know that's that's important. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a point system. Yeah. If you miss Monday you can't go back and redo Monday.
Eddie [00:21:25] And binge drinking was fine. Was it four drinks or more?
Eric Rimm [00:21:29] Yeah. I'm in. Binge drinking is generally defined by sex because of tolerance. And actually I was actually involved in the first paper that defined binge drinking and it was out of circumstance, but it was actually someone who had a data from college students, you know, tens of thousands of college students. And the way they defined binge drinking was if you got in trouble, you know, did you fall down or hurt yourself? Were you arrested? Did you get into a fight? And it was when men had five drinks, college students had five drinks and women had four drinks where there was a sort of suddenly you hit something where these people got in trouble. Mm hmm. So but since then, the definitions, it continues to stand. And people have used it for, you know, triggering strokes and triggering all sorts of other bad things. So that's what the definition of of binge drinking is. And, you know, it's good to avoid that amount in any given time, regardless.
Juna [00:22:18] Okay. So my other question, this is okay. This is I'm not trying to like sabotage alcohol, guys, I swear. Because like, just because I don't like it doesn't mean I'm like, but this is just I always have this question when I see research that specifically focuses on heart disease. And that is that there are things that like we're really focused on heart disease in this country because it's the number one cause of death in America. So good reason to focus on it. However, oftentimes things that like will be good for heart disease will be like bad for cancer or something. And so you get these like two opposite effect on all cause mortality. And I feel like we should be focused on all cause mortality because for everybody listening, all cause mortality is like death from any cause. So it's not like, you know, it could be heart disease, it could be cancer, it could be dying in a car accident, whatever. And so do we have research on the effects that alcohol has on all cause mortality? Because I know it also has opposite effects on cancer, right?
Eric Rimm [00:23:10] Yeah. I mean, it's one of those crazy things like, oh, I'm going to wake up in the morning, what am I going to try to prevent today? You know, that's not what you do. I mean, sometimes you think, oh, I have a family history of heart disease, so maybe I'm more likely to heart disease or a family history of cancer. So sometimes people do their own personal, you know, evaluation of, oh, I should have a little bit less or I should have a little bit more. But that's why I think drinking should not be a health focused thing. It should be like I'm in a social setting, I like it or I don't like I'm going to have a little it's fine. But yes, I mean, which is I mean, your question is, is is really spot on. And and it's it it's crazy to work in this field because I study cancer, too. I mean, we have these large cohorts of populations we studied, you know, heart disease and cancer. And even if you go to the American Cancer Society website and go, oh, what are the guidelines for the American Cancer Study, they say the safest amount of alcohol, zero. That makes sense because it's not like having a drink or two a day is protective for any cancer. If anything, it increases your risk slightly. So the I mean, there have been many, many, many all cause mortality studies. And it's tricky because you really what you'd really like to do is follow people from birth and say, oh, here's someone who started drinking when they're 13 and got into a car accident when they were 21. That's a cause of death. And most large studies of adults don't start at younger ages where there's teenagers that have problems with drinking. In the studies where they start following people from 25 to 30 and follow them till they're 70, 80 and 90. The people that live the longest are people that have, on average, a drink a day. Okay. So, you know, I think it's what it is is a sort of a balance. And again, you don't know what you're trying to prevent, but there is this balance and number one and two is heart disease and cancer. And number four is stroke. And alcohol's a little beneficial for stroke. And number seven is diabetes. And alcohol's a little better but beneficial for diabetes. So you start putting them all together. It's not that surprising that, you know, having about one drink a day is where there's the greatest benefit where you live the longest.
Juna [00:25:08] Okay. Okay, that makes sense. Fine. I'll take it.
Eric Rimm [00:25:11] Know. You know, again, you can do a lot of other things, you know, go back to the gym, you know, eat more polyphenols, you know, have more friends do more podcasts, you know.
Eddie [00:25:23] Podcasting as opposed to behavior.
Juna [00:25:25] I got to say, the real reason I'm so passionate about this guy is because my dad has I'm not sure if it's monocultural alcohol, it's fatty liver disease. And so I tell my dad, dad "Stop drinking". I say his name, babi. That's what you say, babi in Albanian. That's dad. I say, babi, no drinks for you, zero. And he goes, Juna, the doctors say one glass of wine is good for you. I say, Babi, not with fatty. Liver disease is zero for you. Right? And so anyways, babi, if you're listening, Dr. Eric Rimm says 0 if you have fatty liver disease.
Eric Rimm [00:25:53] Babi, listen to your daughter. She's right on this one.
Juna [00:25:56] He loves making his own wine, so he, like, makes his own wine in the basement. And I'm like, Babi, you have to stop making it. He's like, No, you know, it's great because the longer it stays, the better it gets. So I'll just drink it a little bit over time, like No zero wine. No wine, anyways.
Eric Rimm [00:26:11] Hopefully it's low in alcohol.
Juna [00:26:12] Yeah, well, one one can hope. Liver disease is caused by I mean, if it's alcoholic liver disease, it's caused by vast overconsumption of alcohol. Right. So that's basically your liver stops being able to process it.
Eric Rimm [00:26:29] Right. Yeah. Some of the the biological effects of drinking too much, some of the the metabolites and the impact that has on the on the liver. Right. You essentially start you cause a lot of localized inflammation that eventually leads to fatty liver disease and that can kill you people, you know, put you at risk for cirrhosis.
Juna [00:26:47] And over two drinks a day. So when we're talking about like all these the health benefits, we're talking for a 1 to 2 drinks a day, two drinks for men one drink for women. And when we start talking about like three, four or five whatever drinks, like, is that always going to be a negative effect on health overall for all people?
Eric Rimm [00:27:03] Yeah, I mean, I hate to talk about this, but, you know, I think there are there are some studies and actually Doctor Klatsky's original study that I was talking about from Kaiser, you know, you kept drinking. There is still, you know, more benefit from heart disease. It's just that all the other things really start to go up and go up faster. So overall mortality at three and four drinks is not is not better for, you know, compared to nondrinkers but heart disease, since, you know, the more alcohol you drink, the more your good cholesterol goes up and your less your blood clots and more impacts your glycemic status. So it is good for some things. But, you know, I would never say, hey, we all should, you know, be drinking three or four drinks a day and plus your your liver. As I said, you start to upregulate your enzymes so you break down some of that alcohol. But that doesn't mean that, you know, it's you should be drinking that much all the time.
Eddie [00:27:52] So this conversation is part of a series that we're doing aligned with things that people like to do for their New Year's resolutions. So there's other shows on caffeine and sugar, and this is one of them, because a lot of people say it's New Year's. I'm going to I'm going to give up drinking. I guess I'm not sure where my question is here, but is that something that.
Juna [00:28:15] Yeah. What do you think of that?
Eric Rimm [00:28:17] Yeah, I mean, there's a whole what is it called dry October or something sober.
Juna [00:28:20] Sober October.
Eric Rimm [00:28:21] Sober October. Sorry. Yeah. You know what I, I will say there hasn't been a ton of research on, like, what does that do? But I think it is good for people to sort of reflect on, you know, have I been drinking too much? How do how does my body feel in a week or two or a month where I don't drink? Because I think I think that is that is not a bad idea. Just so you remind yourself of, you know, I'm actually a lot sharper on those days where I didn't have four drinks the night before or I slept a lot better. I mean, we know that alcohol interferes with sleep. If you have too much, we know that, you know, alcohol does impact how you feel the next day. So I think I mean, the classic things, of course, if you're binge drinking, you wake up with a hangover. You can't do that every day. But I do think it's not a bad idea. I mean, alcohol's calories, too, so it's not a bad idea to take a month off and just reflect. And maybe you won't ever do that again. Or maybe you'll go, you know what? Maybe I should be drinking less.
Eddie [00:29:11] So we're big into sort of mindful interventions. And just the idea that I like that of if I gave up what sober Oct okay, how do I feel, how do I function differently? How how's my thinking? Could you say a little bit more about the sleep? Because so many people talk about what does that what a nightcap is like. I'll just take.
Juna [00:29:32] I'll have this I'll go to sleep more easily.
Eric Rimm [00:29:34] Yeah. So that's the I mean, that's two different things. One is, you know, I, you know, you can have your whole meal, have water with your meal and it's 10:00 ready to go to sleep. I'm going to have a, you know, shot of bourbon before I go to sleep because it'll chill me out. And that probably does work. It probably helps you sleep. I'm not sure. I've seen research per se on people that just do a single nightcap. But, you know, if people feel like they're sleeping better and they go to bed, they sleep quicker, then so be it. I'm talking about people that have, you know, four bourbons during the, you know, between five and 10:00 at night. And they feel great and they can fall asleep. But they have it does disturb sleep patterns if you have too much to drink. So I think that's you know, again, that's sometimes that's something you can reflect on. Think about it on nights you had four drinks versus night. You had one drink first. Not you didn't drink, you got. Oh, yeah. And you know, I know of people and I've seen some research that sometimes is beverage specific, that there's something about something else in your beverage, whether it's a contaminant in the vodka you're making, or people who drink red wine going, Oh, I can't sleep after I have red wine. So some of that is very personalized and there's not science on it. But the overall impact of sleep patterns are disturbed when you have too much alcohol.
Juna [00:30:43] And I was going to say when we had our sleep expert on the podcast Param Dedhia, and when I took a sleep class at Harvard from Charles Czeisler.
Eric Rimm [00:30:51] Oh,Yeah, of course.
Juna [00:30:52] He's awesome. Okay, cool. So when I took his class in college, I referenced this class the most out of all the classes I've taken because I'm obsessed with sleep. And one of the most dangerous parts of, like, alcohol and sleeping pills, for example, they kind of do similar things where they knock you out. So people will think they fall asleep a lot more easily after they drink, because you do, it's kind of a depressant. But then your sleep architecture, which is how your brain is cycling through sleep phases, is disturbed, so you'll have lower REM sleep and deep sleep and greater amounts of light sleep. And so like a lot of people will feel subjectively that they get better sleep or they fall asleep faster when they drink. But if you measure their sleep cycles, it's actually like the less restorative part of sleep that they get more of from after drinking alcohol, which is why I think it can be so misleading for certain people. Like my mom is the same way with coffee. My mom's like, I can have coffee at 8 p.m. and I fall asleep fine. and it's like, yes, you can fall asleep, but you're not because the quality is not as good without it.
Eric Rimm [00:31:49] I mean, I think that's a you know, that's another good reason to say I'm going to take two weeks off from drinking. Let's see how I feel. And do I feel more awake? Do I sleep better? You know, not just subjectively, but how do I feel the next day? Do I feel more energized because I had a good deep sleep.
Juna [00:32:03] Right. And then you brought up calories, which I also think is such a great point, because we know that obviously a lot of us struggle with overconsumption, I would say more than under consumption, at least in America. And so I guess asking the question of what calories is alcohol replacing instead of being added on top of if you're already like eating enough in food. Right. And you add alcohol on top of your food prior to eating, then obviously, like you'll just continually gain weight, right? So it's kind of like you have to be giving something up to have alcohol if you want to maintain sort of caloric balance, if that makes sense.
Eric Rimm [00:32:38] You know, it's a tricky question. It's because alcohol does other things to you that impact calories or impact the rate of absorption. So it's not just like a perfect scale where you just said, here's 2000 calories, put them all together. And if you eat them, regardless of how you eat them, you're going to gain weight or not gain weight. So some of it, you know, calories do vaso dilate you and increase your heart rate a little bit. So you're actually burning a bit more because you're having a 100 calorie glass of wine versus having a 100 calorie chocolate bar. So, again, it's not a huge difference. And usually in populations that you follow over time. People who drink one drink a day versus none and are trying to control for everything else you can. From their diet to the physical activity. People who drink one drink actually don't gain more weight than the nondrinkers. Once you get up to three or four drinks, I think it overwhelms the system and those people do gain weight.
Eddie [00:33:28] So in some of the studies you've done, there was an additional question which was do you drink with a meal? Can you comment on or maybe your maybe that is what you're talking about now that is it slow the glycemic excursion where your blood sugar doesn't jump up or.
Eric Rimm [00:33:42] Yeah, I mean, we were really hoping that that question was going to like, shine the light on going, Oh my God, this makes everything so much better. They drink with meals. They don't you know, they don't gain weight. They're magic. They live forever. You know, it's it is a tricky question because when you drink with meals, I think we do know it does moderate the the rate at which you absorb the rest of the food in the meal. Unfortunately, many of us, when they say, do you drink with meals, that means you go to a restaurant and they say, would you like a drink to start out. And then 15 minutes later you get the food. So that actually is not drinking with a meal. That's getting your alcohol absorbed very quickly because you don't have any food yet.
Eddie [00:34:20] Yep. Yep.
Eric Rimm [00:34:20] So I think the question didn't capture what we really wanted to capture, which means do you start eating and then have your glass of wine? So, you know, that always bugs me when I go to restaurants. It's like, you know, let's have a drink first. Like I now we're all going to we're all going to have a buzz before we eat and it's going to be absorbed. It's going to going to impact the meal.
Eddie [00:34:37] So this was actually a stipulation in I Live in Needham, which when we moved in a bunch of years ago, was a dry town.
Eric Rimm [00:34:44] Oh, I remember that.
Eddie [00:34:44] Right. It was it was it was a holdover from what, Puritan days.
Juna [00:34:49] Are you kidding.
Eddie [00:34:49] A dry town. Yeah.
Eric Rimm [00:34:50] Yeah. Belmont was like that, too.
Eddie [00:34:51] And then when they started to liberalize and the restaurants were getting licenses, there was no bar there. Just you walk in and that's the only thing that you get. So you had to to your point, Eric had to order food.
Eric Rimm [00:35:05] Oh, to make it.
Eddie [00:35:06] To make it. However, you didn't have to receive the food or eat it first.
Eric Rimm [00:35:10] Yeah.
Eddie [00:35:11] You just had to order the food so people would, would have their drink. And then whenever the chef served the food, you finally got it on on the table.
Eric Rimm [00:35:19] I mean, it is it's I think it's a good experiment for anybody to do. Like, if you're going to go to a restaurant and, you know, the first time you go have your glass of wine like you would normally would, they give it to you or 15 minutes beforehand. The other next time you go order your dinner?
Eddie [00:35:33] Mm hmm.
Eric Rimm [00:35:33] Start eating, wait 10 minutes, and then say, Hey, can I have that glass of wine now? And it truly the alcohol will be absorbed slower and your meal will be absorbed slower. So I think that probably is the healthiest way to drink. Not all of us do it. And it is kind of hard at a restaurant because they really want to get that drink to you. I think they want to get the drink to you. So you eat more?
Eddie [00:35:50] Yes.
Eric Rimm [00:35:50] So it lowers your your inhibition ambitions. You're like, oh, maybe I want to order.
Eric Rimm [00:35:55] Of fries and I'll have another drink and some dessert. Yeah, and dessert, of course. So that leads to your point about overeating.
Eddie [00:36:01] So when I was in college, my roommate ended up one summer, he was learning French and he ended up in Bordeaux.
Eric Rimm [00:36:08] Oh, poor guy.
Eddie [00:36:08] Guy. And he worked at, like, a I think it was called like a vinotheque.
Eric Rimm [00:36:12] Wow.
Eddie [00:36:13] Yeah. Knowing a little bit more about your background as a lover of wines, he ended up working there, and the reward at the end of the summer was that the shop owner invited him to a full dinner at his house, which, as I understand it, correct me if I go wrong here, there were five separate servings of wine.
Eric Rimm [00:36:35] One for each course.
Eddie [00:36:36] Yeah. And he said that he sort of, quote, lost face when after when they serve the final, final after the meal. The sweet wine.
Eric Rimm [00:36:46] Yeah.
Eddie [00:36:47] You and he just couldn't stomach that. Oh and the next day so good they, they just he just he was an American. What can we what can I say? He didn't down the fifth of the.
Eric Rimm [00:36:58] Oh so they were insulted by that.
Eddie [00:37:00] Oh I don't know if they were insulted or just realized that even after a full summer with them, he hadn't taken on all of the attributes. But I think he he's describing five separate wines. I also remember him flying back from France and he arrives at college and he brought several carefully cushioned bottles of wine. And I said, okay, let's crack it open. And he said, No, no, no.
Eric Rimm [00:37:22] No, you got to wait ten years.
Eddie [00:37:23] You know, the wine is nervous from the flight. Oh, yeah, right.
Eric Rimm [00:37:27] It's just the way the month after travel settles.
Eddie [00:37:29] Oh, thank you. All right. Yeah.
Eric Rimm [00:37:30] I mean, that's what the winemakers say. I was like, I don't know. I've never tried that side by side to go out. This one's tired.
Eddie [00:37:36] So you're confirming that I wouldn't want to drink a nervous wine? Yeah. Okay. All right. Thank you. After all these years.
Juna [00:37:41] That was the most important part of the podcast.
Eddie [00:37:43] Yeah. Yeah.
Juna [00:37:44] The other thing I was going to say on the we game question was that when we looked at when we had a episode on the freshman 15, that most of the weight that college students gained was actually attributed to alcohol when they tried to equate for everything else. But I guess it's because college students do a lot more binge drinking probably than like adults do.
Eric Rimm [00:38:03] Yeah, and beer has more calories than wine and spirits. So, you know, again, the classic freshman 15 is that. They're learning how to drink beer in excess of the one along with the pizza and the donuts that they're having with it. So, yeah, I mean, there's clearly something to that. And I think that, you know, 150 calories and even some of these newer beers that probably have 200 to 250 for 12 ounce serving because, you know, much higher alcohol. So and there's you know, there's more free carbs in beer than there are in wine and spirits. So, yeah, it's, you know, again, it calories do count. It's not magic. It doesn't disappear. So, you know, I have to be careful if you get above two.
Juna [00:38:41] And then can we talk about is there any evidence that the benefits we see from alcohol also come from the stress reduction people may get from alcohol? I think it's a very common way for people to relax or feel calm.
Eric Rimm [00:38:51] Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of things that fall into that. Some people you could say, Oh, what people, when they have one or two drinks, they're more likely to be in a social you know, they have more friends, they're more likely to be comfortable in a setting. So, you know, I don't that would be a hard thing to test per se. There clearly is some stress reduction that goes along with drinking and anybody who enjoys it reports that. I haven't seen like that tied to, oh, that's why people have fewer heart attacks. It's because it's through stress reduction. Because it is. That's something that is obviously only while you have the drink. So you may have stress reduction for a couple of hours, but it's not like you wake up in the morning go, Oh, because I had my alcohol yesterday, I feel, you know, more relaxed this morning. That usually is not the case.
Juna [00:39:32] Okay. I guess my most important question of the episode was, if we don't drink, should we start? Obviously, that's about me. Yeah. And if we drink, should we cut back? Like, what is what is the recommendation? What are your best recommendations for people, or is it just just not see alcohol as a health intervention and more of like as an enjoyment thing?
Eric Rimm [00:39:53] I mean, you know, I have a lot of friends who who are cardiologists. And, you know, I also know people who study cancer. So I think there should not be one general recommendation that everybody should drink. You know, obviously, people don't drink for religious reasons or they have a parent who is an alcoholic or they have some problems in their past where they just said, I don't like alcohol, so what am I going to do, tell those people to drink? No way. So, you know, I'm not going to ask you your personal background, but there are you know, there's a small percentage of the population that doesn't drink that, you know, scratching the head going, huh should I drink? And if those people at age 55 have a heart attack and show up to their cardiologist and ask their cardiologist, their cardiologist may say, you know, your good cholesterol is pretty low, it's not going to hurt you to have three drinks a week. So, you know, I all I know is there's those anecdotal situations. I do know that in our big population studies that we look at this where people increase or decrease over time because we've been studying people for 40 years. People that increase, their rates of heart attacks and diabetes go down and people that decrease, their rates of heart attacks and diabetes go up. So, again, I don't know why those people stopped or started, but it did lead to better health when they were drinking a little bit. So but my advice to you would not be, hey, you should start drinking. I really think that's irresponsible. You know, alcohol does modestly.
Juna [00:41:19] It's really high.
Eric Rimm [00:41:20] HDL is really high. Good for you. You're lucky because you're a middle aged. I mean, a young woman.
Juna [00:41:26] I don't know.
Eric Rimm [00:41:26] I mean, younger, middle aged, younger, younger, middle aged women tend to have no.
Juna [00:41:30] Get out of the get out of the studio.
Eric Rimm [00:41:32] I've met young and middle aged women generally have higher HDL. So if you're going to if you're going to advise anybody, usually that's not the group of you said, Oh, you've got to be drinking. Mark is your HDL. I mean, you're. Young, beautiful woman.
Juna [00:41:47] There you go, back in the studio. He's allowed into the scene.
Eddie [00:41:52] So what are your research questions moving forward on this topic?
Eric Rimm [00:41:56] Yeah. That's I mean, what we really want to do is capture pattern better. Because most people, you know, the hundreds of studies have looked at it give people a diet questionnaire where they say, you know, how many strawberries and blueberries do you eat and how many this and that? How much do you drink? And people have to report on average. And then we really want to get as much detail as we can on how many binge drinks did you have in the last how many days each have binge drinking the last month and try to get better at that sort of how many days per week did you drink? So we can figure out that on days that you drank, how much you had? You know, so there's total amount. And I'd love to know more about the genetics because there are differences in genetics of how people metabolize alcohol. So we really need to do is do a sort of triangulation of all those different factors to say, okay, can we define what is the healthiest way to drink? Mm hmm. And then make sure those people that are drinking that way are not healthy just because they also, you know, eat a lot of great food and exercise. You know, is it is it truly that drinking pattern? You know, we have three or 400,000 people in our study, so we have enough statistical power, I think, to sort of tease some of that out. So some of our work will be really trying to hone down on drinking patterns.
Juna [00:43:04] Very important question. When we talk about drinks, I think people vastly change the amounts that a drink counts as based on whether or not they like alcohol. Can we definitively define it? Yeah, I'm talking to my dad again, by the way. Babi, this is for you. How many houses does one qualify as a drink?
Eddie [00:43:24] So first off, for you sniffing alcohol as a drink?
Juna [00:43:27] Yes. Okay. I'm like, This is enough.
Eric Rimm [00:43:30] I will say, I'm sure my kids will eventually listen to this, that my kids for my for my birthday. One year on, they got me the wine glass that holds the entire bottle of wine, you know, holds 25 ounces of wine. And, you know, it's not that big of a glass, but you can bar an entire bottle in it. So it sits on our shelf. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, there are official I mean, when you go to a restaurant, they try to be as careful as possible to pour you a five ounce glass of wine. And that has about the same amount of alcohol as a shot of spirits, which is an ounce and a half of 80 proof alcohol. I will say that the alcohol content of U.S. based made wines has gone up dramatically. It used to be about 12 and a half percent. Now it's like 14 or 14.25 on average. So the five ounce glass of wine actually is creeping up in terms of having a bit more alcohol than the shot of spirits, but it's still about the same. And then a drink as a 12 ounce can of beer, not a 20 ounce and not a you know.
Eddie [00:44:25] Not a pitcher.
Eric Rimm [00:44:26] You know, whatever those other big glasses are called in the UK. So, I mean, I think you're right. You have to be careful because sometimes when you get a mixed drink at a at a restaurant or something, you're getting two shots or it's a big thing, you know, it's a margarita, but it actually has, you know, a shot and a half or two shots in it. So sometimes it's nice to know that. Or if you're making it at home, just, you know, actually measure the spirits that you're putting in something or, you know, take a measuring cup out and go, what is five ounces? And pour a glass of wine.
Juna [00:44:54] It's not that much guys, it's half a cup.
Eric Rimm [00:44:54] It's like, yeah, well it's a little more than half a cup. Eight ounces in a cup but pour five ounces of wine into a mixing thing then put that in your glass and go okay, that's the line that I need to pour to every time to get to one glass of wine and a 12 ounce can of beer. You can buy a 12 ounce can of beer, but there's also 20 ounce cans of beer and bigger. So.
Juna [00:45:11] Okay, I'm appeased. Yeah. I've asked all my questions.
Eric Rimm [00:45:16] The facts. Those are the technical facts. You're right that people tend to, you know, put a little bit more.
Juna [00:45:21] In the glasses I've seen of wine guys. I've seen like balls on a tiny stem. Yeah. And people be like, Oh, this is my one drink. Just glug, glug, glug to the top of it. You know, I'm, you know, like.
Eric Rimm [00:45:30] Yeah, well, there are five glasses of wine in a bottle, right? So if you're finishing off a bottle, that's five glasses of wine, no matter how many times you've actually put it into a glass. So.
Juna [00:45:41] Right. Yeah. Okay. That's all.
Eddie [00:45:43] Anything else that you'd like to add or that we, missed.
Juna [00:45:47] Miss anything.
Eric Rimm [00:45:48] Did you miss anything? Yeah, of course. There's always interesting things to talk about in this area. You know, I think that there are people now that argue both sides. And I think the the side arguing against, you know, suggesting everybody drink zero that become a slightly louder voice. And I completely appreciate the fact that, you know, alcohol has done a lot of bad things for people because of how it's used. And there's not a lot of other things in our diet like that. It's not like people are bingeing on bananas. It's like, oh, my God, there, you know, there's just too much banana consumption. So there's not a lot of other things like that. But alcohol can be very dangerous. And and, you know, it's the number one reason that that young man between 18 and 25 die. They they're drinking too much alcohol, whether they're getting in car accidents or violence or whatever. So it's it is dangerous. So does that mean that everybody shouldn't drink? Well, I you know, first of all, obviously, people enjoy it. It makes them feel more comfortable in social situations. And I do think it's beneficial if you learn how to drink in a healthy way. So that's why I think that's just there's a lot of people, a few of them a physician that worked in an emergency room for a while that started doing research on this and just, you know, screams from the rafters that everybody should be drinking nothing. And I think that's irresponsible, too, because here's something that, you know, you can do that gives you great benefit. And after three or four weeks, you start to accumulate that benefit. So, you know, it's just like everything else in life. You should learn not to eat too many French fries and you should learn not to, you know?
Juna [00:47:15] It's hard.
Eric Rimm [00:47:15] I mean, the French fries taste good and so does the alcohol. So, you know, people who drink and have to learn how to say, okay, a lot. And then there's a lot of research about how do you keep from drinking too much. You know, you sort of plan ahead or you tell other people you don't. There's a lot of behavioral research around how to get yourself to drink less. And I think, you know, that's that can be important. So I think the strongest science for me that convinced me is when I saw studies that were done in 50 countries around the world, you know, you could there's cohort studies that have been done in China and France and Germany and, you know, Africa and all these places where the drinking patterns are so different and what they drink is so different. Yet you still see that people who drink a drink a day live longer or people that drink to drink so they have lower rates of heart attack. So, I mean, it does you don't have to live in France and drink red wine. There are lots of there's several studies in Germany where the main, you know, consumption is beer. And it's the biggest thing is just do it in a healthy way and just do a little bit of it and just, you know, stop at one or two.
Juna [00:48:16] Amazing. That is a great place to end today's episode. Thank you so much, Dr. Richard.
Eric Rimm [00:48:20] Oh, thanks for having me into your studio. Right.
Eddie [00:48:23] Our first ever.
Juna [00:48:25] First ever in-person guest. You can find all our show notes as well as links to Dr. Rimm on our website, foodweneedtotalk.com. You can find us on Instagram @foodweneedtotalk. Find me on Instagram @theofficialjuna and Juna Gjata on YouTube and TikTok. You can find Eddie,
Eddie [00:48:40] Sipping some good red wine.
Juna [00:48:40] Sipping some good, expensive red wine at his, quote, conferences. Now, I know when he says he's away at conferences, we know what he's actually doing.
Eric Rimm [00:48:49] Come over to the house. Eddie we';; have a glass.
Juna [00:48:51] There we go.
Eddie [00:48:51] I'll be there.
Juna [00:48:53] Food. We need to talk to the production of PRX.
Eddie [00:48:56] Our producers are Morgan Flannery and Rebecca Seidel.
Juna [00:48:59] Tommy Bazarian is our mix engineer with production assistance from Isabel Kirby McGowan.
Eddie [00:49:04] Jocelyn Gonzales is executive producer for PRX Productions.
Juna [00:49:08] Food We Need to Talk was co-created by Carrie Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and me.
Eddie [00:49:13] For any personal health questions, please consult your personal health provider to find out more. Go to foodweneedtotalk.com.
Both [00:49:22] Thanks for listening!
