Knew a fellow from Texas sent to manage a business in Russia for 6 months. He was in excellent cardiovascular health when he left. 6 months later he returned with 15 extra pounds of weight.
His story: arriving in Moscow he found it brutally cold and began to drink under friends' advice. He later reported back that "you need to drink vodka and eat like crazy to keep warm and keep you body weight up" in that cold climate.
Anyone else heard this? Does alcohol perhaps keep all the bad stuff(lipids et al) in your blood in solution better in cold weather?
I find that hard to believe. I spent a winter in Helsinki, which is roughly 2 to 4 K warmer than Moscow, and you barely spend any time outside below -15°C (5°F), why would you do that? It's probably dark anyway.
What probably did happen is that he spent a lot more time indoors and not doing sports if he's not an avid gym rat.
I lived 2 years in Sweden, I just bought a good winter coat. Somehow that an a few good sweaters/base layers were enough to keep me warm without hammering my face every evening. But that's just me I guess.
1. what would be "a good winter coat" in that environment? I'm curious b/c I once found myself in upstate NY in winter with Texas clothing and it was near-fatally inadequate.
2. I've heard the phrase "get hammered[drunk]" but not "hammering my face". Searching for that sent me down a rabbit hole, i.e.,
1. You don't know how to pick clothes? Just make sure you pick something wind and water proof that covers your junk. Clothes are often rated for specific temperatures.
2. Legit can't tell if you're serious here? Yes I took the idiomatic "getting hammered" and made it my own with "hammering my face". You really couldn't infer the meaning based on the context of this thread where we discuss alcohol consumption?
Alcohol actually lowers your body temperature slightly, making you feel more comfortable in the cold. The big problem is that the alcohol metabolises straight into the citric NADH, which means your body converts the rest of the food you eat straight into fat.
The eating part is as you can see above relates but it has been demonstrated that the mitochondria in your brown fat burn significantly more energy after cold exposure, so it makes sense you would be hungrier.
As others have alluded, alcohol is a vasodilator. Your blood vessels dilate so you end up with more blood flow to extremities and the surface of your skin. So you feel warmer, but you're actually cooling your body off faster. Vasoconstriction is your body trying to keep your core body temperature up, so drinking alcohol is weakening your body's defenses to the cold.
Alcohol is very caloric. A single shot of vodka can have 100 calories. Also it can increase blood flow to the skin, making you seem warmer than you actually are, at the expense of your internal body temperature.
Using the standard 7 calories per gram of alcohol, the alcohol content of a 12 oz 5% beer (equivalent of a 1.5 oz 40% shot) is 117 calories (12oz x 28g/oz x 5% x 7 Kc/g).
That’s just the alcohol and an average beer would have been more from the additional carbs.
If your vodka shot has only 100 calories, that’s either a weak pour or some weak vodka!
Maybe for you. Moving to Finland and seeing that a six pack cost as much as a month's worth of breakfast was all the motivation I needed to kick the stuff.
Pretty sure Finnish people jump on a ferry to get cheap booze from Estonia instead. Just like Estonians jump on a bus and get cheap booze from Latvia. Where Latvia goes however, I do not know.
Some of us live in free and warm countries with no matriarchical nanny state. Gov't doesn't take half my income, and doesn't charge me an arm and a leg to have a beer.
Sure, and during COVID we kept the liquor stores open--so alcoholics in withdrawal weren't a problem when we had bigger fish to fry. Do you think that's a good thing?
Less about mere "dry drunks" -- which refers to someone who is sober but still stuck in the behavioral traps that led to drinking -- and more about the medical support required for abrupt detoxing from alcohol.
It's probably some deep DNA-induced craving. In the summer I barely want to drink. When it's cold... I want to drink. Maybe it's the Slavic chunk of my DNA.
His story: arriving in Moscow he found it brutally cold and began to drink under friends' advice. He later reported back that "you need to drink vodka and eat like crazy to keep warm and keep you body weight up" in that cold climate.
Anyone else heard this? Does alcohol perhaps keep all the bad stuff(lipids et al) in your blood in solution better in cold weather?