Today is World Menopause Day, and we’re going back to the Menopause Guru, Niki Bezzant, to talk about the one lifestyle change we all need to keep an eye on if we want to have a smoother ride into perimenopause and menopause: why we need to look at the relationship between alcohol and menopause.
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At Capsule, we are deep into writing and reading about perimenopause, because our audience is either going through it or, like the Type-A females they/we are, planning for what comes next. We’ve learned about what a life-changer HRT can be, and how perimenopause can wreak havoc on our moods, just as much as our bodies.
One of our biggest chats on the topic so far has been with Niki Bezzant, a journalist and award-winning editor, who has written two best-selling books on the topic: This Changes Everything, and The Everything Guide. In her work, Niki doesn’t beat around the bush when telling you that if you want to have a smoother journey through perimenopause, then reducing your alcohol intake to drink little or no alcohol is a critical and yet, often overlooked step.
“It’s just one of those messages that we don’t want to hear – I don’t want to hear it either! – but I’ve spent too long researching this topic and you can’t ‘un-know’ it,” Niki tells Capsule.
There is a six-page section in her latest book, The Everything Guide, that is the most concise and serious collection of alcohol-related stats I’ve ever read. It is – pun very much intended – very sobering reading.
“Alcohol makes everything about perimenopause and menopause worse,” Niki writes. “It exacerbates and triggers hot flushes. It destroys our sleep, especially the restorative deep sleep we need. It messes with our moods big time, contributing to low mood, anxiety and depression.
It affects our cognitive function and our stress hormones… and that’s before we get into all the stuff about how alcohol is a Group 1 carcinogen [the same rating as Tabaco and asbestos] and therefore is more of a risk to our health when it comes to cancer than HRT will ever be.”
Of course, there are other lifestyle factors that play a big part in keeping us healthy, particularly as we get older – there is the importance of exercise, and helping reduce stress in our life. But when it came to writing the book, Niki said she knew she also had to be very clear about just how bad alcohol is for our overall health as we age.
“It’s important to talk about, because we have been marketed to by alcohol companies for decades that alcohol is this fun thing, and we use it for social bonding – and all of those ‘wine mum’ memes,” she says. “Drinking is very easy, and we use it as a stress reliever, we use it as a kind of social connecting, and we enjoy it! But the hard factor is that it’s terrible for us – and particularly in midlife and in perimenopause and menopause.”
Dr Louise Newson, a global menopause expert, has a menopause-specific app and website where she writes at length about the risks of drinking alcohol during perimenopause and after.
“You are at higher risk of alcohol-related liver disease and cirrhosis than men, and alcohol-related cognitive decline and brain shrinkage occurs more quickly.
Women are at an increased risk for damage to the heart muscle at lower levels of drinking and over fewer years of drinking than men.”
And there is an increased risk of multiple cancers, including liver cancer, mouth cancer, head and neck cancer, breast and bowel cancer.”
Niki says that midlife is a great time to reexamine our relationship with alcohol – the role in takes in our life, as a stress reliver, as a social lubricant, as a way to numb ourselves from the messy middle – and reduce our intake to protect our overall health as we get older.
In The Everything Guide, she has a list of helpful ways to do this – including re-calibrating your wine serve, by pouring a standard glass of wine (100ml) into a measuring cup, then your glass, so you can compare how much your version of a standard glass of wine is versus the official interpretation of One Standard Drink (trust me, it’s a small pour).
As she writes, the fewer the better, but safe drinking guidelines say no more than 10 of those standard drinks a week. As well as that, you should be aiming to have at least – again, at least – four alcohol-free days a week.
And on today, World Menopause Day, there’s no time like the present to see how your daily or weekly habit of drinking stacks up against those numbers. Because the data is very clear, Niki says.
“Alcohol just makes everything worse; you can’t really refute that. It makes all the perimenopausal symptoms worse and it’s bad for our long-term health. It’s going to make everything about the midlife messiness worse.”
