How to drink alcohol without destroying your health | Prof. David Nutt

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
The sound of a cork popping at a New Year's Eve party. The invigorating buzz of a busy bar on a Friday evening. Alcohol is embedded deeply in our collective consciousness. Whether it's unwinding after a stressful day, celebrating a promotion, or drowning our sorrows, alcohol is usually our drug of choice. But would you still want that drink if you knew that apart from tobacco, alcohol kills more people than all other drugs combined? Today, I'm joined by David Nutt, a psychiatrist and Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. He's the world's leading expert on alcohol, having published over 500 original research papers, eight government reports and 40 books. His passionate, outspoken dedication to sensible science-backed drug policy has landed him in hot water, but the evidence is on his side. In this episode, he explains why alcohol is so harmful, why it's still so popular and how you can start cutting down today. By the end of this episode, you'll have the cold hard facts about alcohol and some simple tips to help guide you on how you could reduce your intake and indeed if you should. David, thank you for joining me today.

**David Nutt** (1:33)
Nice to be here.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:35)
It's a real pleasure. We always start these shows with a rapid fire Q&A with questions from our listeners, and we have some very strict rules. You can say yes or no or if you have to a one sentence answer.

**David Nutt** (1:49)
Yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:50)
You got it already. All right. Is alcohol more harmful than the drug ecstasy?

**David Nutt** (1:56)
Yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:58)
Can reducing alcohol intake improve your sleep?

**David Nutt** (2:01)
Yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:02)
Should the government ban alcohol?

**David Nutt** (2:04)
No.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:06)
If I'm only drinking a glass or two of alcohol a night, could it still be affecting my mental health?

**David Nutt** (2:11)
Depends on the size of the glass. So yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:15)
Do I need to cut out alcohol completely in order to improve my health?

**David Nutt** (2:19)
No.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:20)
And finally, what's the biggest misconception that people have about alcohol?

**David Nutt** (2:25)
That middle-aged men benefit from drinking red wine.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:29)
Alcohol is so pervasive in the world. That I've never really thought about the fact that at some point in the past, our ancestors must have discovered how to make it. And if I guess, I would have assumed this was like 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. But I understand you told our research team that our ancestors have actually had a love affair with alcohol for a really long time?

**David Nutt** (2:51)
Well, we don't know when humans first started manufacturing alcohol, but they almost certainly met alcohol through rotting fruit. And they would have been fascinated by why other animals were foraging around trees, fruit trees, plum trees, etc. Where the stuff would fall on the ground and ferment it, they would have eaten that and they would have found it was psychoactive. The first sort of recorded evidence of producing alcohol is mead, produced from fermenting honey, possibly 40,000 years ago.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:20)
40,000 years ago?

**David Nutt** (3:21)
Yes, it was suggested in the African Rift Valley that the very early hominids actually worked out that you could ferment honey to get a better intoxicant. Then in terms of the modern human era, we've got evidence of people brewing in China 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:39)
So it sounds like basically our ancestors learned how to make fire, make a sharp stick, and then proceeded to basically figure out how to make beer.

**David Nutt** (3:49)
Yes. So there's an interesting tension in the field of paleoanthropology between a man called Yohan Hariri who wrote the book Sapiens, and he postulates that human civilization developed because people discovered how to turn wheat into bread, and therefore they had to plant wheat seeds, and then wait for the seeds to grow, and make sure that their goats didn't eat them. So while they were sitting around waiting for the wheat to grow, they discovered things like mathematics, and language, and all sorts of cultural developments. But there's another guy called Edward Slingerland, who said, ah, no, no, no, wheat was the original crop, but they were growing wheat to make beer.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:33)
We're sitting in England today, and so I guess I think about really ancient monuments in England and Stonehenge, and I understand you have some views about this as well.

**David Nutt** (4:42)
Well, Slingerland believes it's these great monolithic temples, which scattered around most of the world in fact, were not necessarily to do with astronomy or astrology, but they were gathering places where the small human tribes, who were obviously quite disparate and had rather a limited genetic variation, would come together when alcohol was available, that would be in the autumn, to have massive parties in which people would meet others, and therefore you could spread the gene pool because you would actually have some sort of sex out with your tribe, and that was great for genetic variation.