people who drank also tended to eat food which had a high trans fat content

One of the major problems of drinking too much alcohol is not just that it is bad for you in itself, but in that it encourages you to eat unhealthily. Everyone knows that when they drink a lot they tend to crave unhealthy food and a new research project done in Spain confirms this.

In all the Spanish research team looked at over 12,000 adults between the ages of 18 and 64 and studied their eating and drinking patterns. The results showed that drinking alcohol was directly linked to a lower likelihood of eating healthy food stuffs even if the drinking was done during meals.

It is often stated that drinking a little bit of alcohol during meals is a good thing however this research project shows that the drinking led to unhealthy food choices. The results showed that the more alcohol that was consumed, the less likely fruits and vegetables would be eaten and that there was likely to be too much meat eaten instead.

One of the study authors Dr Jose Lorenzo Valencia-Martin also pointed out that people who drank a lot could end up with liver disease and that people who drank also tended to eat food which had a high trans fat content which was also detrimental to liver health over the long term.

Many people talk about how they lost a lot of weight when they gave up alcohol and like to attribute it solely to the absence of the alcohol, but actually it may be that the alcohol was previously encouraging them to eat higher fat foods and that by removing it they were just merely making more sensible food choices.

The research was published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.