Gut Health

Your Guide to Gut-Friendly Holiday Drinking

The holiday season is full of holiday spirits – eggnog, champagne, Christmas cocktails – and those spirits can take a toll on your gut microbiome (the trillions of bacteria that live in your gut).

Just a single night of overdoing holiday cheer can leave you with more than a morning-after hangover. It can also cause a major shift in your gut bacteria, which can bring on symptoms such as:

  • Diarrhea
  • Constipation
  • Nausea
  • Bloating
  • Gas

And GI distress is last thing you want to deal with when you’re trying to enjoy the delicious meals and special treats this holiday season.

But a few simple tricks – including knowing which spirits to drink and which to avoid – can help you make merry without making your gut microbiome pay for it.

‘Tis the Season for Extra Drinks

Even if you don’t indulge much during the year, most of us increase our alcohol consumption during the winter holiday season… especially on Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

That includes a lot of “binge” drinking and drinking “heavily”.

Now, you may not think you’re binge drinking or drinking heavily, but it doesn’t take as much to cross those bars as you’d expect. Binge drinking just means having at least 4 drinks during a single occasion. That means enjoying a few glasses of wine with your holiday dinner and one after-dinner drink technically puts you in the binge category.

Drinking heavily just means you have at least 8 drinks in one week. If you count Christmas, New Year’s, and the week in between them, you could easily hit the “heavily” guideline without realizing it.

Studies show that “event-specific” drinking spikes during the winter holiday season, with most people consuming more alcohol that they normally do. In fact, people tend to drink at least twice as much on Christmas and New Year’s. 

That extra alcohol threatens your gut health… unless you do something to prevent it.

Most Alcohol Hurts Your Gut

Your gut doesn’t like most types of alcohol. Almost as soon as you take a drink, the alcohol starts to upset your digestive system. In fact, even one drink can trigger your system to produce more stomach acid – and that can bring on pain and inflammation in your stomach (gastritis). 

Your gut bacteria have an even worse experience. Drinking alcohol can cause dysbiosis, a condition where bad bacteria (pathogens) outnumber good bacteria (probiotics) in your gut microbiome. Dysbiosis can lead to all kinds of health issues, including:

Several studies show that drinking alcohol (except for a few specific types) has a direct, negative effect on your gut microbiome – killing off probiotics and allowing pathogens to take over. 

One study found that drinking beer can be harmful to good gut bacteria. Oddly, the same study also found that nonalcohol