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When NPR senior science and health editor Maria Godoy hit her 40s, she says she noticed her alcohol tolerance plummet. It used to be that two drinks were not a problem at all. Then suddenly, they could lead to sleepless nights and bad hangovers the next morning. She says college Maria – who could easily down four beers and wake up chipper the next day – would have been so disappointed.
It turns out this is a common phenomenon when people enter middle age, as Godoy reports. Here are a few things to know about why our ability to tolerate alcohol wanes with age.
🍺Liver ain’t what she used to be
Studies show that with age, the liver enzymes that break down alcohol become less efficient, changing the way the body metabolizes booze.
🍹Losing muscle, gaining fat
As humans get older, we lose more muscle, and that muscle is replaced by fatty tissue. Muscle stores water, which dilutes alcohol in the blood. "What this means is that the same drink that previously maybe felt just fine now leads to a higher blood alcohol level," says Johannes Thrul, an alcohol and substance abuse researcher and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. "You feel the effects for longer."
🍷The shift can be more dramatic for women
For women in perimenopause, alcohol can exacerbate the symptoms that come with hormonal fluctuations — like mood swings and irritability, says Dr. Monica Christmas, who directs the Menopause Program and Center for Women's Integrated Health at the University of Chicago. She notes that alcohol is a depressant, also known to increase anxiety and disrupt sleep, making an already challenging time of life even more difficult.
🍸A change could do you good
In the “look on the brightside” department, you can think of a decreasing tolerance as an internal cue to cut back or quit altogether, says Dr. Ken Koncilja, a geriatrician with the Cleveland Clinic. Doing so can prevent some of the problems that alcohol brings on in old age, like increased risk of cognitive decline and cancer. Being proactive in your 50s and 60s can have a huge impact on your health and wellbeing in your 80s and 90s, he says.
Read the full story.
Plus: How to cope with social pressure when you’re not drinking |
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I’m a mushroom forager, and also just a mushroom enthusiast. There are a few dozen species I can readily identify and hundreds, maybe thousands more that I can’t. While the most delicious specimens spur me on, I know many mushrooms out there would give me a stomach ache, or much worse.
On one outing this fall, I found strange almost neon yellow-green mushrooms growing in clumps out of a decaying log. In between the gills the underside was black, and black spores stained my fingertips when I picked them. I posted pictures on a fungi-focused Facebook page, and when people told me these were poisonous ‘sulfur tuft’ mushrooms, I thought, makes sense.
But not all poisonous mushrooms give off a spooky vibe. The death cap, or Amanita phalloides, is white and grayish green, has a pleasant scent, and resembles other common edible mushrooms. Health officials in California say death caps are likely the culprit behind 21 confirmed cases of mushroom poisoning since mid-November, as NPR’s Rachel Treisman reports. Toxins from the mushrooms killed one adult and caused severe liver damage in children and other adults.
Death cap mushrooms grow in many parts of the United States, and are thought to be responsible for 90% of mushroom-related deaths worldwide.
These mushrooms produce a highly toxic peptide called α-Amanitin, or AMA. People typically feel fine for the first six to 15 hours. Then digestive symptoms come on like stomach pain, vomiting, diarrhea and extreme thirst. If you survive that, you may feel better for a short time, before the onset of weakness, pain and restlessnes, according to the FDA. And things get worse from there.
Learn more about how to identify death cap mushrooms, where they grow, and what can be done if you’re unlucky enough to ingest.
And please, don’t start foraging without an experienced guide!
Plus: New hope for an antidote to death cap mushrooms and other poison fungi |
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Dave Titensor/Utah NeuroRobotics Lab |
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Holidays stressing you out? Remember: everything is optional |
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We hope you enjoyed these stories. Find more of NPR's health journalism online.
All our best,
Andrea Muraskin and your NPR Health editors |
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