Gastric Bypass Surgery and Alcohol
Information on whether or not you can continue to drink alchohol after gastric bypass surgery and when you can start.
Studies have showed that drastic gastric bypass surgery intensifies the effect of alcohol. More often than not, this physiological change can also be a factor to a psychological problem referred to as “addiction transfer”. This means that for gastric bypass patients, binge eating, a common addiction for obese patients can be transferred into an alcohol addiction. This would then result with drinking problems and more weight.
Obesity has been one of the largest and leading, if I must say, health problems in the industrialized world –health problems that may later on cause you life-threatening dilemmas such as diabetes, heart disease and even the vindictive cancer. An awfully huge percent of every population is known to be obese and the battle to lose weight has never been easy, especially not to the morbidly obese.
Diet and exercise has hardly helped in the uphill battle of losing weight, or should I say these two options often fail mainly because of the lack of commitment to practice. Drugs are also among the options which you can’t always trust to help. Most of them are ineffective and unreliable. These options then leaves many patients suffering for years until they are left with the last and most expensive resort: surgery.
According to the new studies conducted, bariatric surgery especially that of gastric bypass surgery, is the most effective option for the morbidly obese to end their suffering. This procedure decreases the size of the stomach to at most that it could contain only half a cup of liquid after the surgery as well as adding bypass around the small intestine. If one decides to undergo such surgery, it is important that he or she have tried the other options (diet and exercise, drugs) and must be at least a hundred pounds overweight. Like any other surgeries, this is not a cure all. There’s still a lot of diet maintenance and exercise to go through after the surgery to ensure that you live healthy after the bypass. Patients need to know the do’s and don’ts of the lifestyle after the surgery.
For one, alcohol tolerance of gastric bypass patients will be surprisingly lower than normal. This means that gastric bypass patients are more susceptible to the effects of alcohol. According to Dr. John Morton, Director of Bariatric Surgery at Stanford Hospitals and Clinics, gastric bypass alters a number of physiological functions of the body. One of which is the reduced number of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase which is most responsible for alcohol consumption. Morton added that not only do the patients become more socially relaxed from drinking alcohol, but the feeling of relaxation also happens inside the body itself. To explain such phenomena, the lower esophageal sphincter tone decreases and gastric emptying increase when alcohol is consumed, allowing the patients to eat more food. This means that the more alcohol you consume, the more food you would want to eat.
Morton also took time to remind the patients to be careful in drinking alcohol since they will easily become tipsy, and will take a longer time to get sober so they should not be driving after they have had alcohol. Patients must also be mindful of the potential weight-gain from alcohol since it may surprise them with gain in weight than their supposed loss.
