This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including investigating the state of our mental health in the Great Minds series, how NZ can rebuild stronger post-Covid with The New New Zealand and how to minimise the impact of living in an Inflation Nation.
We also tackled our literacy crisis in our Reading Block series, while dogged investigative reporting by Kate McNamara resulted in an investigation into the awarding of contracts to businesses associated with family members of Cabinet minister Nanaia Mahuta.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2022. Today we take a look at the impact alcohol can have on your body and why some people have chosen to lay off the booze as a result.
How alcohol impacts your body after 40
Fond of a drink or two in the evening? If you’re over 40, chances are you are.
With midlife-and-later drinking appearing to fuel the rise in booze consumption, it’s worth taking heed of the consistent warnings that emanate from the scientific community about the effects of alcohol.
But why does it feel like the effects of drinking are so much worse post-40?
“The organs that metabolise alcohol such as the liver and the stomach shrink as you get older, so alcohol stays in your system longer,” says Dr Tony Rao, a consultant old age psychiatrist.
Read about why you could be doing more damage than you realise.
What I’ve learnt from a year without booze
Author Rob Temple nearly died from alcohol misuse. Now he’s sober.
“Here, write your email address on this.” Just over a year ago, from a bed on the liver ward (“usual bed, sir?”) I shakily thrust a napkin and pen at Rob, a substance misuse specialist. I remember this clearly, despite at the time being full of chlordiazepoxide – librium, to its friends – and unable to tell him who the current prime minister was. He jotted down his details. I’d contact him in a year, I said, to announce I’d reached 365 days sober. He’d no doubt heard it all before – quite a few times from me.
We’d met many times over the months. I’d been in and out with various alcohol-related ailments – withdrawals, a fall down the stairs, hepatitis, pancreatitis, double aspirational pneumonia. A lifetime of heavy drinking had in recent years become a more serious problem, one with much more immediate possibilities of death.
The other day I dug the napkin out of my wallet, unfolded it and sent Rob a note of thanks, to mark a whole year without a drop.
Read Rod Temple’s full story here.
How I learnt to drink less and enjoy it more
Do you open a bottle of wine with good intentions? You’ll just have the one glass but, oops, look, now most of the bottle’s gone. Yes, you know the guidelines suggest 14 units a week and, yes, you’re regularly busting that, but 14 units is nothing, right? Besides, you’re not busting it by that much. Sometimes, though, usually in the morning, a thought will niggle — am I overdoing it, is it possible that I am an alcoholic? But then the thought vanishes with the headache. After all, everyone else drinks a bit too much, don’t they?
Well, no, they don’t.
British broadcaster Adrian Chiles used to knock back 100 units a week. He knew he couldn’t quit alcohol, so he came up with a more realistic way to live.
How to be a flexi-drinker
Phil Hilton shares his belief that yes, you can have your beer and drink it too.
My name is Phil and I’m almost certainly not an alcoholic. However, I often find it hard to refuse a drink. It’s not a physical yearning, it’s a complex set of social obligations – by which I mean drinking culture.
I’m making a plea for a new approach that stops short of total abstinence, but frees us from the book of booze rules we have all learned and internalised.
Drinking is changing, however, I still drink more than I want to. I’m in my late 50s and ludicrously, embarrassingly, I often find it hard to drink on my own terms.
I want to drink when I feel like it, in the quantities I choose. Total abstinence I respect, but it doesn’t appeal. I do not feel addicted to alcohol. I have many friends who have stopped entirely, and I fully support their decision, but I still want to enter a country pub and sit by the fire with a Guinness.
I’m advocating a delineated status: a clear position people will respect without offence or a sense of rejection. I want to come out as a flexi-drinker.
How many drinks is really too many?
A handful of pints of beer an evening is known to make itself felt the next day, but scientists have never before looked at how alcohol affects our long-term ageing process.
Now Oxford scientists have found an answer to the age-old question of “how many drinks is really too many”.
Brace yourself wine lovers.
See how many units of alcohol you should really be limiting yourself to each week.
