What your liver wishes you knew about alcohol

Professor Shawcross, welcome to the podcast.

How are you?

I'm good, thank you, and it's lovely to be here.

We're delighted to have you on.

Our guests are, are, are, uh, our listeners will all take a very big deep breath, uh, when listening to episodes like this.

We did one on, uh, [laughs] on alcohol not so long ago and, uh, they were a little upset by, by it in, in some regards.

Tell us about, um, uh, tell us about, I suppose, what binge drinking actually is.

Let, let's start there at the very basics of it.

We, we teed it up in the introduction there.

What is binge drinking?

Yeah.

So binge drinking actually is, is drinking more than a, a certain amount of alcohol in the drinking session that people really underestimate.

So for a woman, if you have six units of alcohol, Karl, in, in one drinking session, or for a man, eight units of alcohol in one drinking session, that's, that constitutes a binge drink.

Okay.

And I'm sure people are very much aware of what a unit might be.

They're not silly.

But actually we underestimate what a unit is.

So for example, I'm gonna give you an example, when you go to the pub and you order a, a glass of wine, chances are they'll give you a large glass of wine.

They'll give you a 225 mil goblet full of wine.

[laughs]

That's actually three or three and a half units.

In a glass?

Yeah.

Wow.

Because a one unit, uh, because one unit of wine is 125 mils, not, not the big, the, not the big 225 or 250 mil glass of wine.