Over time, this can lead to a loss of skin tone and a permanent red color. Over time, this deficiency can cause our skin to lose all elasticity and become wrinkled. Alcohol can also cause a deficiency of nutrients like vitamin A, which helps with cell regeneration and collagen production — both of which are essential to youthful skin. Zinnia Health understands how challenging it can be to stop drinking. Keep a close eye on how much you drink, the type of drinks you most enjoy, and ways it can affect your eating habits. Most alcoholic beverages are full of empty calories with no nutritional benefits.
Another reason to limit your alcohol intake is that it’s one of the main culprits for those extra pounds you’ve mysteriously put on. Although free radicals play their own role in protecting your health, when they’re not kept in balance by antioxidants, they begin to damage your fatty tissue, DNA and proteins. When the liver is working hard to detoxify the body from alcohol, it creates more free radicals than the body’s antioxidants can handle, which leads to something called oxidative stress.
So it’s more likely to be there when you take medicine. The older you get, the longer alcohol stays in your system. Alcohol may medications and drugs that cause hair loss not only make you more likely to get sick as you age, it also can make common medical problems worse.
How Alcohol Affects Your Blood Vessels
Furthermore, alcohol can cause enlarged blood vessels, which gives our skin a redder appearance. While we might not notice the effect of drinking on our cells, alcohol can speed up our aging process in many other ways. When alcohol dehydrates your body, it’s easier to see the blood vessels on that part of your face. If heavy drinking is a regular thing, you could face some potentially irreversible skin damage. The longer the booze stays in your system, the more alcohol builds up in your bloodstream, which puts you at greater risk for damaging effects.
Does Alcohol Make You Age Faster?
We recently launched our in-app chatbot, Melody, powered by the world’s most powerful AI technology. Plus, we’re always introducing new features to optimize your in-app experience. This puts us at an even greater risk for prematurely developing cancer or disease. Women who had 28 drinks or more per week had a 33% higher chance of developing the same syndrome. A severe thiamine deficiency can cause beriberi, a disease that affects several organs and can lead to neurological disorders, such as Wernicke’s encephalopathy or the Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. Our body needs thiamine to metabolize carbohydrates, amino acids, and fatty acids.
Our skin gets thinner and drier as we age. Drinking alcohol can pull more water out of your body and make your chances of dehydration even higher. As you get older, you have less water in your body and — for reasons that aren’t quite clear –you also feel thirsty less often.
Study Uncovers Impact of Binge Drinking, Longtime Alcohol Consumption on Biological Aging
Although drinking too much can make you fall asleep more easily, it also reduces the amount of time that you spend in the rapid eye movement, or REM, stage. Because you need water for almost every bodily function, including blood circulation and lubricating joints, you may feel the effects of aging more intensely if you drink regularly. Heavy drinking over a long time can shrink brain cells and lead to alcohol-related brain damage (ARBD) and certain types of dementia.
We might not notice the effects right away, but underneath the surface, alcohol damages the many bodily systems and functions that are vital for living well into old age. On one hand, alcohol can also cause a deficiency of nutrients like vitamin A, which helps with cell regeneration and collagen production — both of which are essential to youthful skin. Let’s take a closer look at the effects of alcohol on aging.
Researchers have found that excessive alcohol consumption can affect the skin. If you’ve been wondering if drinking alcohol causes you to look older, we’ve got the answer. Even if you’re not a heavy drinker, the toll that alcohol can take ages you. But younger people who drink alcohol are at a higher risk of injury from falls due to dizziness and confusion. Over time, heavy drinking can lead to loss of judgment, focus, and memory. But you may feel older due to alcohol and aging effects.
Alcohol and Aging: Does Drinking Make You Look Older?
- Broken capillaries, the tiny blood vessels near the surface of the skin, tend to crop up as you get older.
- We work with individuals, couples, and families to ensure that you and your loved ones are on the same page when it comes to your sobriety.
- Melody is here to help as you adjust to a life with less (or no) alcohol.
- For example, drinking alcohol when you take aspirin can raise your chances of stomach problems or internal bleeding.
While a lot of these changes can be seen outwardly, it’s worth noting that research has found that drinking alcohol can accelerate the aging process at a biological level. If you drink heavily or consistently, you could activate the aging process, putting you at risk of health conditions that typically affect older people. It’s also worth noting that drinking alcohol can also increase our risk of developing skin conditions, such as psoriasis, rosacea, or eczema. Changes to blood vessels brought on by excess alcohol consumption can affect various parts of the body. In addition to alcohol dependency, being a heavy drinker and bingeing can have negative effects on your body over time.
Some types of dementia and alcohol-related brain damage develop as your brain cells shrink. Because alcohol makes you more likely to do things that you might not otherwise do, consuming it can interfere with an otherwise healthy diet. Telomeres protect your chromosomes from damage and are longer in younger people. You might not notice the effects right away, as you notice wrinkles when you’re dehydrated, but your body knows what’s going on. As you age, the body’s mechanisms that protect you from free radicals diminish. Oxidative stress damages the cells throughout your body.
Drinking contributes to a host of age-related conditions.
The effects of alcohol are a significant factor in making you look much older. In addition, people with alcohol addiction tend to have nutritional deficiencies that can impact the eyes. These serious symptoms are believed to be related to alcohol being a neurotoxin, which can cause tissue damage. As a result, it becomes harder for the heart to pump blood throughout the body, leading to high blood pressure, heart disease, and even stroke. Alcohol is a vasodilator, which means it causes blood vessels to relax and widen. When you lack vitamin D, it affects the body’s ability to absorb calcium.
The Benefits of a 90-Day Addiction Treatment Program
Damage occurs particularly in the retina and optic nerves in the eye, where it’s usually age-related rather than alcohol-related. Drinking a large amount of alcohol causes damage to your eyes over time. At high levels of consumption, alcohol acts like a vasoconstrictor, causing the blood vessels to constrict and become narrower. One night of heavy drinking can make your wrinkles more evident.
Alcohol Causes Oxidative Stress
It examined whether cumulative alcohol consumption — the number of years a person consumes beer, liquor, wine and total alcohol — as well as recent binge drinking were related to aging. According to a Northwestern Medicine study published in the journal Aging, scientists found that consuming certain types of alcohol over long periods of time as well as binge drinking both speed up biological aging. What’s not so well known is the effect of alcohol consumption on biological aging, specifically binge drinking, long-term drinking and type of drinks — such as beer, wine or liquor. Over the long term, regularly drinking alcohol (especially in higher amounts) is linked to the earlier onset of age-related cognitive decline, which causes brain functions such as memory and thinking to progressively worsen. Regularly drinking any amount of alcohol will raise levels of estrogen in the body, which increases breast cancer risk. Drinking alcohol can cause wrinkly, dry skin from dehydration and lead to poor sleep, weight gain, and changes in eye and hair health that cause us to look older.
- Red wine has antioxidants called polyphenols that may help your cholesterol level and protect your blood vessels.
- Heavy drinking over a long time can shrink brain cells and lead to alcohol-related brain damage (ARBD) and certain types of dementia.
- Reducing our alcohol consumption or eliminating it entirely is one of the simplest (and cheapest!) things we can do to protect our youth.
- Of course, rapid aging affects your physical appearance.
- Over time, heavy drinking can lead to loss of judgment, focus, and memory.
The noticeable differences in skin complexions are often early signs of alcohol abuse. Do you seem to look and feel older than you think you should for your age? The Dietary Guidelines for Americans define excessive drinking as more than two a day for men and more than one a day for women. Give your body the best chance at health and reclaim your youthful energy. If you or a loved one struggles to regulate or limit alcohol consumption, you don’t have to do it alone. Regular drinkers can trigger biological functions that make them age from the inside out.
These findings may help people make lifestyle changes to promote healthy aging. According to a 2021 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 62% of people age 12 years or older consumed alcohol in the past year and 21.5% of that group binged alcohol in the past month. Further research is needed to investigate alcohol’s exact effects on aging. Heavy alcohol use can disrupt sleep, hormones, and increase your risk of developing chronic diseases.
To find out more, Health examined the latest research and spoke to medical experts to find out how alcohol impacts aging—from the health of your skin to cellular health, hormone function, sleep, and chronic disease risk. If you want to keep looking and feeling young, it’s probably time to start drinking less alcohol. Even if we’ve noticed changes in our appearance from alcohol, we may be able to reverse the effects by changing our drinking habits.