Video: The Truth About Alcohol & Men's Health | Dr. Mark Moyad's Wellness Equation #1: ABV + V=WTF!

2019 PCRI Conference | Transcription

This hurts me. This hurts me greatly because any of you who have known me for thirty years, some people here have. I love my glass of beer at the end of the day a couple of times a week. I just love it. And, unfortunately, there's no other subject that we can cover today that is actually more of an elephant in the room. I kid you not. So, now I'm about to depress myself and depress you and tell you very quickly what I tell groups all the time. It's called the Moyad equation and unfortunately, I just have to be honest with myself and that is, essentially, alcohol or ABV plus V equals WTF. ABV plus V equals OMG. 

What the hell is he talking about? 

See, here's what's happened over the past few decades and it's happened to quietly we don't even pay any attention to it. ABV is the alcohol by volume. So if you look at the beers when I was a kid it was Labatt's, it was Budweiser, 4% alcohol, 5% alcohol. You look at the big beers selling today now, 7.5%, 9%. They keep jacking up the percentages in the beers and people go, "Oh, I love these craft beers. They're amazing!" Yeah, because you get the alcohol hit very quickly. You don't have to wait for three cans of beer to get there. You can get there basically in one can of beer. 

So what does that mean when they take the ABV and they double it now in this generation? The addiction potential goes up tremendously, first of all, right? So the addiction potential to keep you addicted, so this is what they've done with marijuana too. They increase the concentration. So people say, "Well, it's not an addictive drug." It is an addictive drug when you increase the concentration. It's like caffeine. So you increase the concentration, you potentially increase the addiction. 

Okay, put the addiction away for a second, okay. ABV, you've increased the alcohol by volume. What that means is a can of beer when I was a kid and had a fake I.D.‚ yes, I'm sorry mom and dad, but I still turned out fine. Alright, when you bought alcohol when I was a kid your ABV, you'd have one can of beer, 100-150 calories. No problem. Today's, and I'm not just talking about beer. This is hard liquor this has happened to and wine also. Today, you get a can of beer, we're doing the calorie counts on them, they're running 200-300 calories per can. You have two cans of beer, you've got to get on a treadmill for 45-50 minutes just to burn off those two every day. So the ABV increase has come at the expense of potentially, not just the addiction, but so much easier to put on weight on the human body and when you increase the ABV what else happens? The pancreas goes, "Ohh, this is fabulous, thank you! We're going to make even more insulin. In fact, we're going to overproduce insulin!" Which makes it so much easier to store fat in the human body. 

So immediately, you're running into this problem with the ABV. But what's the V? ABV plus V equals WTF. The V is the volume. It would be one thing if you just increased the alcohol content. Now, we go out and I go, "Can I have a beer," and they go "16 or 22?" I'm going, "What the hell happened to 12 ounce?!" That's in the museum. You can't buy a 12 ounce beer anymore. So now you've increased the volume which means you've increased the caloric amount even more. So when you have a beer at the bar, we're not talking 200 calories, 250. Many times there more like 300, 350 calories. That has been a recipe for disaster. It is the number one problem I'm seeing. Don't you find it interesting when you pick up any fad diet book and it works, any fad diet, they say, "Oh, in the first few weeks cut out all alcohol." And you're like, "Oh, damn." And you cut it all out and you go, "Oh my God, I'm losing weight! This is magical!" Because you're cutting out one of the largest sources of potential weight gain that doesn't get the credit it deserves. Do you know the government last year came out and said that the average adult now is getting about 100 calories a day from alcohol? What they didn't say that if you do that math that means that's about 10 extra pounds a year just on average. So you're spending your whole year just trying to get rid of the weight that you potentially are putting on with alcohol today and that's average. 15-20 pounds, no big deal, you're still working on that. 

This has become a huge problem. Now, if you go look in the prostate cancer studies, there are now enough data to show that it's equated with aggressive prostate cancer diagnosis, that high alcohol consumption is associated with aggressive prostate cancer. It's also immune-suppressive, and we want our immune system to work for us, right? So alcohol is having these problems. And then there's something else in BPH we're not telling patients. Did you know some of the biggest selling drugs for prostate enlargement, and that includes Avodart and finasteride, when the researchers looked at people consuming more than a couple drinks a day, high amounts of alcohol they found that the drug wasn't working very well, and the prostate kept growing and growing and wasn't able to control the prostate size like it did. 

The point being of this 5-minute diatribe is it kills me to say this, but I really think it has become the elephant in the room. That if a person can control their alcohol intake or just eliminate it‚ which I don't necessarily want them to do, but it's hard today because of the addiction potential on the concentration. It is one of the greatest ways to lose weight. It's one of the greatest ways to get deep phases of sleep. And it's one of the greatest potential changes to make change. So, I'm not gonna do another soapbox on any other topic, but just remember ABV plus V equals WTF! Thank you very much, that's my speech.