Fermentation to wine has, for thousands of years, been the only available means of preserving the nutritional value of the plentiful fruit harvest in hot climates, and incidentally of providing a water supply safe to drink; but it has always had its drawbacks.
Alcohol is a metabolic poison, attacking your liver and kidneys as well as making exceptional demands of them. When fortified and purified by distillation it is separated from the vitamins and minerals in the original fruit or grain, which you need to metabolize the alcohol as fuel; you steal these from other food sources in your body to relieve the poisonous effects as quickly as possible.
Spirits and chemically refined beers and wines are therefore a drain on your nutrition. This is why sherry and cocktails are such effective aperitifs — they steal trace nutrients and lower your blood sugar, making you hungry. In excess, of course, the alcohol itself and this hypoglycaemic effect combine to stupefy your palate and general sensibility.
The late Dr Carl Pfeiffer of the Brain Bio Centre (address here) has contributed much to our biochemical knowledge of alcoholism; several of his books are in print. He recognized four types of alcoholic. First the chronic depressive, overstimulated with the brain sedative histamine, who slowly drinks himself to death because of his depression.
In direct contrast stands the overstimulated individual who has too little brain histamine to relax and breaks his periods of tension by alcoholic binges at weekends. Then there is the cerebral allergic who becomes dependent on alcohol and over-indulges, but is embarrassingly hypersensitive to intoxication. Finally there are probably a few pre-diabetics with hypoglycaemia who use alcohol as a handy means to satisfy their frequent carbohydrate cravings.
Once dependence on alcohol is established, for any of these reasons, it enters the adaptation phase of stress disease for anything up to several years. Provided you can get alcohol regularly it cheers you up, keeps you functioning and makes you quite confident you can give it up whenever you want to. But if you cannot get it, you become irritable and nervous, gloomy and unable to concentrate or function well.
Eventually the periods of good cheer shorten and you need to drink earlier in the day and more heavily to keep going. By this time your mineral and vitamin nutrition are gradually deteriorating with secondary effects on your appetite and metabolic organs. Your liver in particular is poisoned by every drinking bout. Cirrhosis is the fibrous inflammatory healing process that patches up wounds in your degenerate liver. At first it may swell as a result but eventually the fibrous tissue shrinks and strangles its circulation and bile passages.
Total exhaustion of your response to alcoholic stimulation heralds the end stage of your illness in which structural disorders of your liver and kidneys predominate. Even at this stage, however, a lot can be reclaimed if you decide to try appropriate corrective action.
What to do