Closing Time: Last Call For Alcohol

Alex: So, Abbie, we had a pretty good run streak going there — we ran for 61 days in a row before we stopped. I'm excited about what we accomplished.

Abbie: I know, pretty cool — and it wasn't even planned, right? You started a run streak, and I was transitioning out of doing something else, and I thought, "Oh yeah, I could do this too." It was kind of fun to just let it take its natural course.

Alex: Yeah — I got it into my head that I'd go for 365 days in a row.

Abbie: Yeah, when you told me that, I was like, "Eh — no, hard pass."

Alex: Yeah, that didn't quite work out. But it was really good. One of the things I noticed — because I put my data into Claude the whole time — was that my heart rate on easy runs went way down, my average heart rate. So that was nice progress. I was also trying to build up my fast pace, so I went from about one mile to 1.6 miles over the course of the streak at a seven-minute flat pace, which I was really excited about, since I'm trying to build up my 5K pace and wanted to try something different. Pretty cool thing to do during the summer — ran every day for more than two months in the heat down here in Texas, and even kept it up on vacation.

Abbie: Yeah, no, I agree — that's amazing, in terms of your numbers. I actually plugged my data into Claude too. I hadn't been doing that — I was really just, "I want to keep running in between finishing this training cycle and starting a new one," so I didn't have any real plan, I just ran what I felt like running. But after you mentioned yours, I plugged mine in the other day, and what it showed for me was that my heart rate stayed about the same — around 130 on easy runs — but my pace increased by 30 seconds at the same heart rate.

Alex: Yeah — adaptations. We'd recommend the run streak, just be careful to make sure you're getting enough rest. That was ultimately why I ended mine — I noticed I was sort of draining my body battery, so to speak, throughout that final week. I had a trip to New York with the kids, and I was exhausted. So even though I wanted to run across the Brooklyn Bridge, I thought, you know what, I'm just going to rest — and it was fine. I'll do it another time. So there you go — run streak, try it out sometime and see how it works for you.

Abbie: Welcome to Practically Fit, Real Fitness Over 40. I'm Abbie.

Alex: And I'm Alex.

Abbie: And today we're going to talk about alcohol, and how it can impact your fitness routine and your general sense of well-being, especially as you age.

Alex: Yeah, that's right, Abbie. And we'll share some of our thoughts and stories on alcohol as it relates to fitness and what we've experienced, and look at what the research has to say about alcohol and exercise. I'll warn you ahead of time — we've got a lot of studies in this show, but I think it's really fun to talk about some of these, because there are some pretty startling things. I'll say right off the bat, I was shocked by one of the studies I found while researching this episode. It covered the topic we're about to discuss from an angle I hadn't really considered, but it made total sense the more I thought about it — one of those "oh yeah, that makes sense" things. We'll talk about that study more in a moment.

Abbie: Yeah, but first, we're kicking off today's show with a new segment — we're calling it the Warm-Up.

The Warm-Up

Alex: Yeah, so the Warm-Up — get it? It's like a warm-up for the show. It's a fitness-related podcast.

Abbie: It wasn't so complicated that we couldn't see the idea.

Alex: We're going to warm up by going through some news stories, and it'll be fun and engaging. I've got some headlines here — I love reading the news, and I especially enjoy reading news about fitness. For those of you who follow the fitness world, you know there's no shortage of articles every week about fitness and fitness-adjacent topics, and I often find them quite funny. So we're going to go through a few headlines today and talk about them. The first one comes from USA Today, one of the two physical newspapers we get at our house — and the reason we get this one isn't for its amazing news coverage, it's because it has really nice puzzles. Abbie likes to do crossword puzzles, so it's an affordable way to do that.

Abbie: Actually, on health and fitness — that's very good for you in terms of longevity. Good proof that Sudoku and crosswords are good for your mental fitness.

Alex: So, a plug for USA Today's crosswords and Sudoku. I also like their sports section. But this article — it's genuinely one of my favorite articles this year. The headline is "Coffee May Help Heart Health — Up to Five Cups a Day, Experts Say." I read this and got really excited, because I'm an avid coffee drinker.

Abbie: Yeah, you were just looking for something to prove your habit is good for you.

Alex: Yeah, we'll talk more about that in a moment. Here's a quote from the article: "Most coffee drinkers can relax about their daily brew, according to a new scientific statement." This is a statement from the American Heart Association on caffeine and heart health. It finds that up to 400 milligrams of caffeine a day — roughly three to five eight-ounce cups of regular black coffee — is generally safe for most adults, and may be linked to a lower risk of heart disease, heart failure, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.

Abbie: I'd underline "generally" and "may" in that statement.

Alex: Well, I found this to be good news for those of us who worry about our blood pressure, or who have that running in the family. 400 milligrams of caffeine a day is a good amount of caffeine — that's more than I have on a daily basis. I do a pint of cold brew in the morning, mixed with almond milk.

Abbie: It's basically a Guinness glass of cold brew.

Alex: It's not full. And I'll note — once I saw this article about a week ago, I had been cutting back to one cup of cold brew in the mornings, and that was it. Now I'm just like, you know what, I'm going back to two cups a day after reading this. So, the influence. Here's a quote from Dr. Amish Mehta, a cardiologist with Allegheny Health Network. He says, "Really, you want to drink up to five cups of coffee a day at most, and keep an eye on what you're putting in it. Try to minimize cream, sugar, and flavor additives that add extra calories and sweeteners, and be careful with the energy drinks." He also notes that a 16-ounce energy drink can have roughly twice the caffeine of a cup of coffee, and has been shown to cause sudden spikes in blood pressure when consumed in higher volumes — especially among younger people, who may mix them with other drinks.

Abbie: Aka alcohol.

Alex: Yeah, that's a thing I take away here too — when I talk about coffee, I'm having almost no calories. The cold brew, I put a splash of almond milk in; other times I just drink it black. Occasionally I'll get a peppermint sweetener or something if I go to the dreaded Starbucks. But this isn't a license for people to go out and pound those giant Starbucks drinks — or even worse, the Dutch Bros ones.

Abbie: Oh my god, do you remember when we looked up the calories in those?

Alex: Calories and caffeine — I think you could surpass 400 milligrams with some of the drinks they're selling nowadays, so be careful about that. The article is really just saying three to five normal-sized cups of black coffee a day are fine for you. And they go on to say, "For now, experts say the new guidance should be seen as reassurance, not a free pass to chug caffeine all day."

Abbie: See, Alex took it exactly the other way.

Alex: I have not been chugging caffeine all day — I had two cups. The AHA statement stresses that people with certain conditions, including uncontrolled high blood pressure, heart rhythm problems, or pregnancy, may need stricter limits and should talk with their health care providers about what's safe for them. I'll just say — yes, I have high blood pressure, hereditary, but it's not uncontrolled. It's controlled by medication.

Abbie: Right — and also, you've been a coffee drinker your whole adult life, right? I think that's different.

Alex: Since my late 20s, yeah.

Abbie: So I think it's different if you're just introducing it, versus knowing what your body does with it. I don't drink a lot of coffee, and on the occasions I have, it's really made my heart race, or I just don't like the feeling of it. So I generally avoid too much caffeine.

Alex: Yeah. So there you go — good news for us coffee drinkers, and for tea drinkers like Abbie and the Brits, who are a lot less concerned with this news. You can definitely have six to eight cups of tea a day.

Alex: Let's move on to the next story. This one comes from Wired — Wired magazine, as we used to call it when I was younger — and it's got a really entertaining headline. It's "Using AI for Just 10 Minutes Might Make You Lazy and Dumb, a Study Shows." Wow, talk about being direct. Do you think they wrote that headline with AI?

Abbie: No — because AI wouldn't have said that about itself.

Alex: AI inception. So the article says using AI chatbots for even just 10 minutes a day may have a shockingly negative impact on people's ability to think and problem-solve, according to a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA.

Abbie: Some pretty big hitters in that group.

Alex: That's quite the collection of researchers. As for the study — researchers tasked people with solving various problems, including simple fractions and reading comprehension, through an online platform that paid them for their work. Some participants were given access to an AI assistant capable of solving the problem autonomously. When the AI helper was suddenly taken away, these people were significantly more likely to give up on the problem or flub their answers. The study suggests that widespread use of AI might boost productivity at the expense of developing foundational problem-solving skills — or, as the headline put it, it might make the economy better but make you dumber.

Abbie: That's really interesting, because it kind of feels like the training-wheels thing — if you have training wheels on for too long, you become mentally reliant on them. That idea of relying on the AI assistant and assuming you can't do it yourself. The thing that jumped out to me was the "give up" part — I thought that was really interesting.

Alex: Yeah. There's an expert quoted in the article — I'll paraphrase — who basically suggests that AI should help teach you to solve a problem, rather than solve the problem for you. Which I like, but doesn't that sort of go against the whole idea of AI, that it can consume huge amounts of data you can't consume, and do things — including solving problems — for you? I was just imagining this guy showing up at Anthropic or OpenAI and going, "Hey guys, I've got an idea — we should really make these tools help humans solve problems, rather than solve it for them," and everyone just laughing him out of the room. Not surprising to me, though — just from observing people using AI in the wild, I suspect it's going to result in people losing some of their cognitive skills, and we'll be living in Idiocracy sooner rather than later.

Abbie: Yeah, I worry about critical thinking too.

Alex: Exactly. Okay, final headline of the Warm-Up. It comes from Men's Health — my favorite men's-health-related magazine from the 1990s and early 2000s, which still has a lot of online content. The headline is "Should You Mega-Dose Creatine? Some Wellness Influencers Say We Should Now Take Five Times What We're Taking Now. Here's the Real Scoop."

Abbie: Oh, but — but — but.

Alex: Yeah.

Abbie: Why is everything mega-dosing or microdosing? Can't we just... dose?

Alex: It's the Ozempic thing, right? That's what created this idea of mega-dosing and microdosing. I don't know — I think they're just new buzzwords.

Abbie: A hundred percent.

Alex: So this one's about creatine. I've been taking it again recently — I hadn't taken it since my 20s. I'm not totally sure how it's been affecting me, since it's coincided with the run streak too, over the past couple of months. I have felt more energetic during the day, but I've also been running early in the morning a lot, so the jury's out on that. Here's what the article has to say about mega-dosing creatine: this emerging science has wellness influencers worked up. Andrew Huberman, PhD, has excitedly — well, for him — labeled creatine as, quote, "vitally important for the forebrain, the part responsible for planning, action, and rule-setting." So, in case you didn't know, you have a forebrain. Gary Brecka has posted that creatine is, quote, "amazing for cognitive function." Dave Asprey has said the nutrient is important to the, quote, "world of consciousness." Some influencers are even suggesting taking as much as 25 grams of creatine daily. I'm taking five grams right now, which is a normal dose — and yeah, I got my units confused for a second there, but it's five grams, not milligrams. Meanwhile they're suggesting up to twenty-five grams daily. I haven't taken it since I was younger, when my buddy and I used to take it for our strength training.

Abbie: Oh, I remember this story — it's hilarious.

Alex: Yeah, it's funny, because they're talking about mega-dosing now, but back then there was no talk of mega-dosing — the big thing was that there was liquid creatine. Normally it's a powder, right, but there was a company that made liquid creatine, deliberately marketed to guys, and it came in this vial. Did y'all have GNC in the UK?

Abbie: I don't think so — no, no, no. We had something called Holland and Barrett, which was like — you could go and get vitamins and healthy stuff there.

Alex: So imagine two broke college kids going into the GNC mega-store — which was basically a vitamin shop — here in the US, to get this liquid creatine, because somebody had told us about it, "I'm using this liquid creatine, it's amazing," you know, word of mouth. So we go to the store, and I kid you not — the creatine is in a glass box. They had to unlock the box.

Abbie: Oh my god, the marketing behind this.

Alex: It makes you feel like, "Oh, this isn't just any normal creatine — this has to be stored in a special container that has to be unlocked."

Abbie: Super metal.

Alex: Oh yeah — it appears before you, the liquid creatine. So we bought it, split it half-and-half, which made it more affordable — I think it was like $40, so $20 each. Shout-out to Landry, he'll remember this story. We immediately go back to campus, hit the gym, mega-dose the liquid creatine, and we're doing bench press, and it's like, "Oh, I can feel it — I'm getting extra reps here." It felt fast-acting, immediate. So that's my fun creatine story — but let's get back to the article, nobody wants to hear about that. Despite all this talk of mega-dosing, the article says: not so fast. Darren Candow, PhD, a professor at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, has published roughly 100 scientific studies on creatine.

Abbie: He's the creatine guy.

Alex: This guy does nothing but study creatine, which is truly amazing. He says that taking super-doses of 20 grams of creatine or higher, for either physical or mental benefit, is, quote, "overhyped and very context-specific." So now we're starting to undermine the entire premise of the article. One thing to remember about creatine, too — people used to think, and I heard this a lot when I was younger, that you didn't want to take too much because it could damage your kidneys, and you had to be really careful. But apparently Dr. Candow, along with his colleague Forbes, published a study this year showing that at doses up to 10 grams, long-term creatine supplementation is safe — though they haven't studied that in terms of brain health yet, just whether it harms your organs. Candow himself says, "I personally take 10 grams a day, as that dose likely checks all the boxes for muscle, bone, and brain." And here's a quote from his colleague Forbes, who says there's research showing that creatine can, quote, "change the geometry of bones to make them stronger." So it's not just helping with muscle recovery — it can help your bones too. That's definitely something to consider as you age, because the more that comes out on this, the more beneficial it seems. Though the key thing is that just taking it won't help your bones — you have to combine it with strength training. But the funny thing is, the article goes through all of this, and then comes around at the end to say, "You know what, five grams a day is good." So you don't need to go buy a liquid one that's locked in a cabinet — though that may have been the real key to those extra reps on the bench press. My takeaway is: if you're taking a normal dose of five grams of creatine a day, you're good. I thought that was an interesting article. We'd love to hear from you if you're taking creatine — shoot us an email at alex@practically.fit, and we'll share your thoughts on the next podcast. Fun article to wrap up the Warm-Up with.

Abbie: That is significantly longer than a warm-up we'd normally do before any exercise. But thanks, Alex — what fun. Now we're going to transition to the main topic of the podcast today, which is alcohol and fitness. On an earlier episode we talked about dad and mum bods, and one of the things we touched on was how alcohol can affect you, especially as you age — as you hit your 40s, 50s, and 60s — and some of the biomolecular shifts that occur in your body, including with molecules related to alcohol. So we thought it'd be interesting to explore this further. We've done a couple of different things in the past around this, like Dry January — we did Dry October, and what do they call it, Stoptober, or something like that, right? And I know, Alex, you've been talking about doing Dry August or Dry September. I'm going to do a half marathon in December, so I'll probably cut back on alcohol quite a bit as I train for that — not that we drink loads to begin with.

Alcohol and Fitness

Alex: I will say, so far, I've been highly successful with Dry August.

Abbie: It's July, babes.

Alex: No — it's August 1st today. So I am killing it on Dry August. We're recording this at noon on August 1st.

Abbie: Okay, I hadn't noticed we'd clicked over. So you're — what, five hours in?

Alex: There was talk of going to a distillery this afternoon.

Abbie: Yeah, exactly! You're doing really well — you talked about going to a distillery or a vineyard. Both of those would be excellent when you're on a month of dry. But yeah — so we're interested in both the science on this, and also, practically, what we've experienced ourselves. There was a study we cited last time we touched on this, in the Dad and Mum Bod episode, where we said that study noted changes in how your body metabolizes alcohol in your mid-40s, which they said was, quote, a result of an uptick in alcohol consumption in people's mid-40s — often a stressful period of life. So that got us thinking: how has our alcohol consumption changed over the course of our lives? And how does alcohol affect our fitness now that we're in that 40s-to-60s range?

Alex: Yeah. So I want to start at the top with that study I mentioned in the intro, the one I found really surprising. This was actually a meta-study — where researchers take a bunch of literature from a variety of studies on a similar topic and look for trends. This one's around alcohol and exercise. It's from 2015, from the journal Psychiatry, called "Exercise and Alcohol Consumption: What We Know, What We Need to Know, and Why It Is Important." Perfect article for this podcast. The most interesting thing — there's a subheader in the study that says considerable evidence indicates that physical activity and alcohol intake are positively related. So that means people who exercise more also drink more. And you know, it makes total sense — I hadn't thought about it much until I read this study. One of the first things it mentions is a correlation between high-level sports teams and alcohol, like celebrating their wins — rewarding themselves with alcohol. But it goes way deeper than that. They cite studies that dig into the correlation between activity and alcohol consumption outside of sports. Abbie and I were talking about this the other day — we watched one of those Untold documentaries on Netflix, about the English footballer Jamie Vardy. Really amazing story — he came up basically from nothing, from the lowest level of English football, rose through something like nine tiers to play in the Premier League and win the title with Leicester City, who had never won before — a complete underdog story.

Abbie: But it also talked about his drinking — he used to make his own vodka drink, putting Skittles into a liter bottle of vodka.

Alex: Right — super talented athlete. And it really dug into the drinking-and-football culture, or "football," as you call it in England. Here in American football, we've always had that stereotype too, of college football players going out and partying all the time. We also watched another Untold documentary, about Johnny —

Abbie: Johnny Football.

Alex: Exactly. Very relevant to this podcast. So that's one dynamic they mention, but they go beyond college sports too — they cite another study. One of the first indications of a link between activity and alcohol consumption assessed responses from more than 40,000 adults in a national survey. It found that, compared to abstainers, moderate drinkers — four to seven drinks weekly for females, eight to fourteen for males — were twice as likely to be physically active. And moreover, as the intensity of activity increased, so did the strength of the association with alcohol consumption. More recently, French and colleagues surveyed responses from over 230,000 American adults and also found that drinking was associated with an increased probability of exercising. Listen to these numbers — the relationship held up even among heavy drinkers, more than 46 drinks in the past month for females, and more than 76 for males. My math isn't great, but that's more than 15 drinks a week for males.

Abbie: Yeah — what would be interesting is, I'm assuming that's units of alcohol, which is actually a lot less than you might think. If you look at one unit of alcohol for wine, that's not what you get poured if you go to a bar — especially when they ask, "Would you like a large glass?" That's probably three or four units right there, which is still fairly heavy. It is interesting, though, whether there's some of that psychological aspect you mentioned, Alex — "I've exercised, so I can have a drink" — that interplay in how you think about it. I'd also be really interested to see the comparison across other geographies. I think this is a more prevalent thing in, say, the UK and the US, but if you go to France or Spain, people don't just go out to drink — you go and have dinner, and a glass of wine, and your dinner lasts three hours, and your glass of wine lasts three hours. It'd be really interesting to see the difference across cultures.

Alex: Yeah — because, as we've just been chatting about, we're talking about our own cultures, both the US and the UK, where there's a pretty strong drinking culture compared to those other countries. Pretty interesting links there between activity and alcohol consumption. I know personally, sometimes I feel that way — if I do a hard workout, I think, "I'm going to have a drink tonight." So it makes sense. Another study they cited also showed that, to that point, individuals tend to drink more on days they're active — so there's kind of that theme of rewarding yourself after hard work.

Abbie: I agree. And definitely what you said about team sports — going down to the rugby club after a match, or the cricket club — those were very common things growing up. Super interesting study to kick us off, but let's move the discussion along, because more and more we're seeing strong evidence, including from the Surgeon General and health organizations, that alcohol increases your risk of death over time. There's a lot of evidence now that there isn't any safe level of alcohol — that it's linked to eleven major cancers, and just how hard it is for your body to process alcohol. Yet we're still seeing this evidence of people who exercise — who are doing things to look after their bodies — and drink. So that got us thinking about that relationship, and also about how you approach drinking alcohol as you age, and its impact on your overall fitness.

Alex: Yeah, so we're going to look at this from two angles, Abbie — muscle and strength as you age, and cardiovascular health. So we researched what we could find on both subjects.

Abbie: Let's start with muscle. According to a 2023 study from the journal Calcified Tissue International — Alex finds the most amazing journals —

Alex: By the way, I believe it's from the UK, because it was from the University of — I should really get myself a subscription — Exeter, or I don't remember the exact university, but the people who wrote it were English, and "Calcified Tissue International" sounded kind of British to me. Sounds like something you lot would read.

Abbie: Sounds like a must-have magazine.

Alex: Get your subscriptions ready.

Abbie: Anyway — from that journal: people who consume excessive amounts of alcohol could lose muscle and increase their risk of frailty as they age. This study looked at people having ten units of alcohol a day — that's the equivalent of a bottle of wine, or about five pints of a lower-percentage beer.

Alex: Yeah — and again, you know this is a British study because they're talking about units of alcohol, but it's important, because if you talk about "drinks" more loosely, people can wander into risky habits. It showed, essentially, that drinking excessively has a negative impact on your muscle mass over time. We looked around, and I couldn't find any research saying that drinking alcohol was good for your strength as you age — which is probably not surprising. But it is a shift, right?

Abbie: Because I remember, even like fifteen years ago, medical professionals saying a glass of wine a day was good for you.

Alex: Yeah, we'll talk more about that in a bit. But no — there's no evidence that drinking heavily is good for your muscle strength as you age. So don't drink a bottle of wine every day if you want to maintain your muscle mass. We also looked into cardiovascular health, and found a study on that. Here's the title first, because we may not even need the quote after I tell you this: "Alcohol and the Aging Cardiovascular System: A Dangerous Synergy Uncovered." Do you think we need the quote after that title?

Abbie: No.

Alex: It said, quote: "The findings reported in this paper convincingly demonstrate that chronic alcohol intake accelerates the biological aging of the heart and vasculature, reduces cardiovascular reserve, and increases the risk of heart failure. Given the widespread prevalence of alcohol use and the global trend toward an aging population, these findings are both timely and clinically significant, and should serve as a call to clinicians, researchers, and public health professionals — everyone who talks to you about your health — to recognize alcohol use as a modifiable risk in the aging cardiovascular system."

Abbie: Interesting. So when we take that research, and what we've seen ourselves — if too much alcohol is bad for your muscle mass, and bad for your cardiovascular health, and that's very clear from these studies — should we stop drinking altogether? Like I said, we're seeing more and more of this in society, I think, right — a "sober curious" movement, a movement away from alcohol. I do think there's been a real shift in the last few years away from it being so accepted and normalized — though I think it's still very normalized overall.

Alex: Yeah, but like you were saying, the alcohol industry used to tout that a little bit of alcohol was good for you. If you go back to the mid-20th century, that was really prevalent. Then it became more of a "wine can be good for your heart" kind of thing. But even the amount of wine we're talking about there, speaking of units of alcohol, isn't what people think, is it?

Abbie: Yeah, it's like an inch and a half, right?

Alex: It's not your giant glass of wine.

Abbie: Exactly. But I also think it's really interesting that there's evidence of ancient civilizations making and processing alcohol — so it's not a new thing, not a twentieth-century thing. But I do wonder — and I think I mentioned this on the last podcast where we touched on this — if we're reaching the point with alcohol that cigarettes reached, where it tipped over and people suddenly realized just how negative it was for their health.

Alex: Yeah, maybe so. You and I both smoked cigarettes when we were younger, and now we wouldn't really think of touching one, just because of the shift that occurred during our early years.

Abbie: Exactly. And I remember growing up, it was everywhere — people smoking in restaurants, bars, on planes.

Alex: On planes! But then they started showing pictures of blackened lungs, and even now, when we go to the UK — I mean it's shifted a lot here too — but there they plaster the cigarette packs in the store with warnings, you can't even see the actual cigarettes, just the warnings. So yeah, we may be reaching that point, but it's tough for our generation — and we always joke about which generation I'm actually in. I was kind of on the bubble, but I like to identify as Gen X. But we grew up with alcohol — we grew up with our parents drinking it, it was around in society, it's really part of our culture, and that's probably why it's so ingrained in our lives. I think it's difficult to just say, "Oh, I'm not going to do this anymore." It's changed a lot with work culture, but it used to be really ingrained there too — go back and watch Mad Men, and you'll get a sense of how the advertising industry treated alcohol in the 1960s and '70s. Even in some of our own working years there were work happy hours, and sometimes pressure to drink — not so much now, but I think it is shifting. It's just difficult when something is so ingrained in the culture.

Abbie: And of course, we deeply recognize that there are people who have real issues with alcohol — we're not touching on alcohol abuse patterns here, we're setting that aside. If you have a healthy boundary and relationship with alcohol, as opposed to moving away from it entirely — I saw a really interesting clip of a health professional from the UK talking about what moderate levels of alcohol actually look like. To your earlier point, Alex — what is a unit of alcohol, what does that look like? She said it can be part of a healthy lifestyle if you accept that it carries risk, and treat it the way you might think about something like bacon — something you might introduce into your diet in moderation. So really, it comes down to moderating your drinking, and making sure you have healthy boundaries and a healthy relationship with it.

Alex: Yeah — you're supposed to have bacon about once a week, by the way, or maybe once every couple of months.

Abbie: Not me.

Alex: So — this is something we've been thinking about. Are people our age, that late-millennial, early-Gen-X range, giving up drinking? I wanted to look into it, and found a lot of really timely information, given the discussion going on in society right now. There was a survey out just this month — I believe from the alcohol industry — that actually says the generation after us, the baby boomers, are leading the way when it comes to cutting back or quitting drinking. That flies in the face of the narrative we've heard recently, that it's Gen Z who's drinking less. This is saying it's actually the boomers leading the way. I'll quote from an article in the Financial Times — but listen closely, because this is an interesting metric, the way they describe it, and I think it's something the alcohol industry pays close attention to: whether people have consumed alcohol in the past six months. For anyone selling alcohol, that's an important number — they want to see people drinking at least within the past six months. So the survey said, quote: "71% of boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — consumed alcohol in the past six months, the lowest drinking rate of any generation, and down two percentage points from three years ago." This is from IWSR, a market researcher for the global beverage industry. By contrast, 74% of Gen Z who are at legal drinking age reported drinking in the past six months, up from 66% three years ago, as young people in their late teens and 20s catch up with the total adult population's drinking rate of 76%. So think about that — the average adult drinking rate over the past six months in the US is 76%. Boomers are down to 71%, and Gen Z is up to 74%. So there you go — that flies in the face of the narrative that's been going around.

Abbie: Yeah, but there are a gazillion questions you could ask about a survey like that, because "consumed alcohol" could be comparing apples and oranges — I might have had one drink in the last six months, and somebody else might have had ten drinks a week.

Alex: True. The other thing I thought about was that it didn't really speak to our own generations. So I searched around to see what I could find on Gen X and millennials, and right before we recorded this, I found an article from the Wall Street Journal with the headline, "Bars Are Giving Up on Young People and Catering to Gen X Instead." As it turns out, Gen X are the most reliable generation of alcohol consumers, and we love nostalgia-themed nights and events that end well before midnight. So the narrative is that Gen X are maintaining their drinking habits, but also don't want to stay out past midnight — which tracks perfectly for our age at this point. So, Gen X — do you think that describes us, Abbie? We still maintain the drinking habits we've had all our lives, but we don't want to stay up late?

Abbie: Definitely don't want to stay up late. But I think I drink considerably less than I did when I was younger.

Alex: Yeah, I didn't take this to mean binge drinking, just that people are still regularly having a drink — a few cocktails, beer, wine, whatever — a few times a week. Pretty interesting stuff. It seems like Gen X really hasn't changed much in terms of alcohol consumption, and perhaps there's more movement away from it in other generations — even the boomers, which surprised me. But overall, going through all these surveys and studies and data, I think it still leads me back to: it's probably good to cut down on your alcohol use as much as you can as you age, but like you said, it's a risk you can work into your lifestyle responsibly. And I don't know that, if you haven't been drinking for most of your life, I'd start now, as you age.

Abbie: Yeah, no — I think it's exactly that. Like I said, I'm going to start a half marathon training cycle in August. It's not that I drink a lot, but I'll probably not drink at all during that cycle, because it just doesn't feel good when you're doing long runs and putting that kind of stress on your body — I want to maximize my recovery. So I'll probably step away from it for that period.

Alex: I'm curious — I'll join you. We've done months off before, once or twice a year, but I'm curious what it feels like to go without alcohol for three months and see.

Abbie: Yeah, I really want to see, over this training cycle, whether not having a drink at all affects my training — do I recover better?

Alex: Yeah — and you've got all that rich data now. If you have a Garmin or an Apple Watch or one of these fitness devices, you can actually see how alcohol impacts you. Pretty fascinating stuff. Bottom line: alcohol is not good for you.

Abbie: Surprise, surprise.

Alex: Surprise, surprise. But if you are drinking, just try to do it in moderation. I think for some of us it's hard to just think, "I'm never going to have whiskey again." I like whiskey — it's okay to have it a few times a week and be sensible about it. So there you go.

Wrap-Up

Abbie: Absolutely. Well, that's it for this edition of Practically Fit. As always, if you enjoyed the episode, please share it with your friends, your family, anyone really — you don't have to like them, just share the episode — or leave us a review or a comment.

Alex: Yeah — and again, if you want to share a comment or a story, you can send it to me at alex@practically.fit, and we'll share it on the next episode. So if you've got thoughts on alcohol and how it impacts your fitness, or maybe you're someone who's giving up alcohol, we'd love to hear your story — or really, anything we discussed on the podcast today. Abbie, what are we talking about next week?

Abbie: We're going to talk about strength training — where we are on our strength training journey, how we approach it, and why it's important to us.

Alex: That's right. So join us next time for that. And until then — remember, when it comes to fitness, you don't have to be perfect, you just have to be practical.