There are two signs to the physical addiction.

1. You begin needing more and more alcohol to get the same effects. This is called increasing tolerance. “Tolerance” describes how much alcohol your body can handle. As your body adjusts to alcohol, your tolerance increases. What two drinks did in the beginning may take five, ten, twenty, or even more drinks as tolerance increases. Your body finds its limit. Your cells adapt to the sedative effects of alcohol, harden to protect themselves from the toxic irritation, and learn to use more and more calories from alcohol as a source of food. But these three adaptations take their toll. In fact, after many years of heavy drinking, tolerance begins to reverse. Tolerance reverses when cells start breaking down and simply can’t handle as much alcohol.
2. You begin to feel as if you can’t get along without alcohol. You feel more and more pain whenever you try to quit. This sign of addiction is called the withdrawal syndrome and appears only when you take alcohol away. Your body complains out loud, your nervous system flashes urgent signals to the mind: “Give me another drink to calm me down.” The agitation in the cells can be so great that your whole body can go into convulsions. This is serious. About 20%-25% die during these convulsions if they don’t have medical treatment. As a rule of thumb, the longer and harder you’ve been drinking, the more problems you’ll experience during withdrawal. The shorter and less excessive your drinking career, the more likely your withdrawal syndrome will look like a hypoglycemic attack. You’ll feel fatigued, jumpy, restless, headachy, quick to anger, and depressed. Further, these symptoms will disappear temporarily, if you eat or drink something sweet, or if you drink alcohol.

Medical research shows two major causes of physical addiction.

First, your cells adapt to alcohol. To your cells, alcohol becomes a way of life. Your blood bathes every cell in alcohol on a fairly regular schedule. Your cells adjust. They grow to expect these doses on time.

Your cells learn to cope with alcohol by defending themselves against alcohol’s toxic effects. Cell walls harden to retain stability and reduce toxic damage. But as your cells get tough against alcohol, gradually more and more can be consumed. Your tolerance increases. In the long run, however, cell walls break down. At this point, your cells lose their ability not only to keep toxins out but to retain the essential nutrients you get from food. Many of them stop functioning altogether, or start functioning abnormally. That’s when your organs (heart, brain, liver, kidneys, etc.), which are nothing more than whole systems of cells, begin to fail.

Your cells show signs of physical addiction another way. They crave alcohol as a food. Alcohol converts almost instantly to glucose in the blood. Known as blood-sugar, the body uses this as food for all the cells. When you drink alcohol, like eating a candy bar or drinking a soda, the cells get a quick burst of energy. This energy, as you may know, is measured in “calories.” Alcoholic beverages pack a lot of calories. Five to ten drinks provide the same amount of calories as a well-balanced meal. But the meal, of course, would have provided essential vitamins, minerals, proteins (amino acids), fats, fiber, and the complex carbohydrates—all of which the body needs to stay healthy. Unfortunately, the simple carbohydrates of alcohol satisfy the hunger too well. And, when you drink a lot, you usually don’t feel like eating a meal, balanced or not.

Your cells also grow to crave alcohol for the sedation. Alcohol sedates all of your cells. Also, secondary compounds called isoquinolines form in the brain where they cause heroin-like sedation of the brain and nervous system. That’s why, among all the cells, nerve cells react most violently whenever alcohol is taken away. You’ll see anything from shaking hands and nervous irritability, to convulsive seizures.

Second, your body has a problem with alcohol metabolism. Alcohol metabolism is normally a simple chemical process. Basically the liver attempts to detoxify the body of alcohol by breaking toxic alcohol into acetaldehyde (another toxic chemical), and then reducing acetaldehyde to acetate or acetic acid which quickly convert to glucose in the blood. In “alcoholic” drinkers the liver functions poorly during this second step. It converts acetaldehyde to acetate at about half the speed of a “normal” drinker’s liver.

This malfunction causes two main problems. First of all, acetaldehyde builds in the blood. As a powerful toxin, acetaldehyde adds to the toxic damage alcohol causes the cells, which start to fight as much to protect themselves from acetaldehyde as from alcohol.

Secondly, acetaldehyde interacts with brain enzymes, creating isoquinolines, those opiate-like chemicals that tranquilize the brain and nervous system. This chemical byproduct doubles or even triples the sedative effect of the alcohol. What’s more, this added sedative in the brain dramatically increases the addictive power of alcohol. Because of it, withdrawal becomes more extreme. You go all the way from euphoric sedation while drinking, to a high-pitched buzzing anxiety when you withdraw. How do you get rid of the anxiety? Alcohol. Or other sedative drugs.

So the metabolic problem causes greater agitation in your cells, as they’re forced to fight another toxin. But it causes greater sedation as well. That’s why, when you get the alcohol “really working,” you’re raring to go yet calm and cool. And all this because of a glitch in metabolism. Clearly this glitch is the main reason for your physical addiction. About 10% of all drinkers have this problem.

So why do some livers develop this metabolic problem, while others do not? Why do some livers set the stage for alcoholism by processing alcohol at a slower rate? There are at least five ways the metabolic problem can begin:

• Genetic inheritance.
• Fetal alcohol addiction.
• Overeating.
• Prolonged excessive drinking.
• Sugar addiction.

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Genetic inheritance

The “alcoholic metabolism” can be inherited. If your mother or father or any of your four grandparents had a problem with alcohol, you stand a better than average chance of having a problem with it. What’s the average chance? In America, about 10% of all drinkers become alcoholic drinkers. If you have a history of alcoholism in your family, and if you become a drinker, your chances of becoming an alcoholic drinker are anywhere from 2 to 5 times greater than average. Instead of a 10% chance, you have a 20%-50% chance of becoming an alcoholic.

The chance increases because you inherit certain elements of your biochemistry through your genes. Your ability to metabolize alcohol is more likely to be weak, if it was weak in one or more of your parents or grandparents. One other point: You may also inherit a weak sugar metabolism, and this can lead to a problem with alcohol metabolism once you start drinking.

Fetal alcohol addiction

A baby can be born with a full-blown alcohol addiction. At birth, the child’s liver can have a problem with alcohol metabolism, and he or she can have built up a tolerance to alcohol, exhibit a withdrawal syndrome, and show all the physiological traits that accompany alcoholism.

This can happen to any baby whose mother drank heavily during pregnancy. Why? Because alcohol goes from the mother’s blood directly into the fetus: It crosses the placenta. What’s worse, if the mother has the “alcoholic metabolism,” toxic acetaldehyde that builds in her blood also crosses the placenta. In fact, if the mother drinks too heavily during pregnancy, the baby can suffer fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). Symptoms include unusual deformities in skull and facial features, mental retardation, severe problems with digestion and metabolism, nervous disorders, malnutrition and many other extremely serious disorders.

But if you were born with even a mild addiction to alcohol and begin drinking later in life, alcohol is much more likely to cause you problems. Why? You can reactivate the alcoholic metabolism that developed when you were in the womb.

Advice to pregnant mothers? Don’t drink. Current medical advice says don’t drink at all during pregnancy. Some studies show that even small amounts of alcohol may compromise fetal health. Also if you are breast feeding, don’t drink, because alcohol passes directly into mother’s breast milk.

Overeating

Here’s another way you can cause metabolic problems that will set the stage for alcoholism. Overeating, like overdrinking, is a problem of excessive appetite. Many alcoholic drinkers had problems with overeating when they were young, before they started to drink. For some, the habit of overeating disappears when their drinking habit begins. Others alternate habits: They overeat, then they over-drink, then they overeat, etc. Still others do both concurrently.

Overeating is a problem of excess, as is alcoholism. Overeating forces the metabolism to work overtime and is especially hard on the liver. The liver has two main functions: to help gain valuable nutrients from normal digestion, and to rid the body of toxins. When you eat too much, the liver is forced to work overtime on normal digestion and, as a result, excess toxins accumulate in the blood. The same happens when the liver must process too much alcohol.

In many ways alcohol brings welcome relief to overeaters. It offers instant calories without the burden of all that digestion. If you drink before you eat, it depresses the appetite and you eat less. If you eat too much and drink afterward, you speed digestion.

Overeating teaches the metabolism how to deal with excess. Overdrinking fits the same biochemical scenario, but it’s easier in a way. Why? Alcohol is light; food is heavy. To the overeater, alcohol provides relief while still satisfying the need for excess.

That’s why, when you quit drinking, you may naturally begin overeating in order to satisfy your body’s expectation for excess. So when you quit, you can do yourself a big favor by learning not to overeat. This in turn will help you to reduce your cravings for alcohol.

Prolonged excessive drinking

After many years of abuse the internal organs can wear out, especially the pancreas and liver. When the liver loses its ability to metabolize alcohol efficiently, tolerance can increase, and other problems of alcoholism, like excessive cellular damage and withdrawal syndrome, can appear.

Prolonged drinking of any amount can trigger hypoglycemia and consequently alcoholism. First, the pancreas breaks down, starting the sugar addiction. Then the liver breaks down, starting the alcohol addiction. Hypoglycemic withdrawal symptoms become slowly exaggerated into more severe alcoholic withdrawal symptoms, along with a greater and greater compulsion to drink.

Sugar addiction

The body metabolizes alcohol and sugar in nearly the same manner. That’s why a serious sugar addiction early in life can become the perfect set-up for an alcohol addiction later on.

Over-consumption of sweets and other foods high in sugar often leads to hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). Like alcoholism, hypoglycemia is a metabolic problem. And, like alcoholism, it cause a vicious cycle of addiction. Studies show 95%-100% of all alcoholic drinkers suffer from hypoglycemia. Here’s what happens: When we ingest sugary foods or alcohol, our blood-sugar (glucose) shoots up like a rocket. This immediately signals the pancreas to produce insulin, a hormone which reduces blood-sugar. Usually the body produces insulin in just the right amounts, lowering blood-sugar to normal levels without much trouble.

After years of excesses and abuse however, this sugar control system starts to break down. Then, the pancreas begins to make mistakes. It begins overreacting. Whenever sugar or alcohol is ingested, it produces too much insulin.

Too much insulin sends the blood-sugar level crashing below normal. This abrupt decline results in the body suddenly feels drained, fatigued, depressed after the initial high. Your energy level goes way down. You may have a headache, feel tense and anxious, or experience fuzzy thinking. These are withdrawal symptoms; they appear anywhere from one to four hours after the initial high. How do you get rid of the symptoms in a hurry? More sweets...or alcohol...or both.

Nutritionists classify sugar and alcohol as foods because they have calories. This is the only reason for the classification. But as “foods,” they are seriously lacking, for neither sugar nor alcohol has any nutrients to help with their digestion. For practical purposes, sugar and alcohol are the same food. One beer has about the same instant caloric value as ten teaspoons of white sugar.

Like alcohol, pure sugar, candy, and simple carbohydrates cause extreme energy highs and lows, robs nutrients from the body, and continues to keep brain chemistry imbalanced. Experts have labeled sugar as an addictive drug, pointing out the cravings and withdrawals, as well as destruction of balanced body and brain chemistry.