About six to eight months before I left Japan, I gave up alcohol. I didn’t so much as have a problem with it, as I learned a lot about its deleterious affects on the body from neuroscientist and ophthalmologist Andrew Huberman. As it turns out, it doesn’t matter how little you drink so much as the regularity of your drinking in it potential to damage your organs — including your brain.
It doesn’t take long for me to apply iron will, once I’ve learned something from science—so, except for a few shots of sake with a friend before leaving Japan, and a couple of beers with my parents in the first months of my return to New York—in about a year, I really haven’t drunk alcohol at all. And — to my delight, my father, now, has taken a greater interest in his health—and has impressed upon me his desire for a steady supply of non-spirited brew; we now buy it regularly—and I am thus a fan and experientially moved to say, I love it. Of course I will have to take note of how much I consume — because I really want to re-acquire my six pack (the one I had in my abdomen before I left Japan — not the one in the refrigerator).
To clarify the point made above — having said that I “didn’t have so much as a problem” with alcohol—I should say that while on Geoje Island, South Korea—in probably the most important teaching assignment I had ever had (Cause it had been acquired through the auspice is of my ex girlfriend – who has meant a lot to me), I had my first allergic reaction to a bad can of Guinness—it cost me my job, because the English Services company I was working for out of Gangnam had though I was on drugs; I came to class and after a half hour was seeing aura (a prelude to migraine) and I had taken i’ll and had to avail myself of the facilities—and, in 2014 a re-occurrence of this happened in Lakewood, Colorado—after again—one glass of an IPA; I was sick within an hour. never happened before in my life. So — for the next 10 years or so — I was very careful about what beers I drank. In Japan I only drank Yebis or Asahi. I learned that some beers have surfactants in them. Some people are allergic to these…. It’s also true that these additives can be found in cheap, processed foods and in diner food. I know, because I had a similar experience after eating in the Lynbrook Diner with friends in 2017; I had had no alcohol at the time. Since then, I had tried to find “non-–hoppy” beer—thinking this was an issue, too. But I would still sometimes get a migraine the day after drinking, and I have never been one to drink a lot; I realized as a young man that there is no point in drinking so much that one gets sick. Well — I guess health caught up with me and alcohol in another way. So — not being one who needs alcohol to feel good, I just gave up having it all together, and I’m happy that I probably have a healthier brain and organs in my corpus for it. At least that’s the idea. And I hope—as experts say, will probably also reduce the risk of major diseases on this bent. This is something I think that vegetarians also benefit from — and now, removing alcohol from my diet may double those benefits! I encourage you to do the same.
What I do miss is saké. So—I hope to find that some company procures a non-alcoholic version – because there is great delight in the aroma and heat of a hot flask of the Japanese rice wine—and as pleasant is an ice-cold one. I do plan to drink again when I am back in Japan – minus the ethanol!
Thanks for reading!
