I know I bang on and on about alcohol,  but for good reason. If you’ve had cancer, before you make any other diet and lifestyle modification – address the alcohol.

Yes it’s that big a deal.

Not just because of the:

As soon as you drink alcohol your liver stops breaking down estrogen. It shuts the door and focuses solely on the alcohol because too much alcohol in your body can lead to coma and death.

But back to the estrogen. Before you had a relaxing vino, your liver was happily breaking down estrogen. Estrogen is a fat-soluble compound that needs to be made into a water-soluble compound so it can be excreted from the body.

This takes 2 steps in the liver:

The risk you take when drinking alcohol, taking pharmaceuticals or over the counter medication (like pain relief), is that your liver stops doing it’s normal jobs like breaking down estrogen, to immediately focus on the dangerous intruder!

Your body knows that these substances can harm you if they’re allowed to build up in your bloodstream.

So your liver locks the door, until further notice, for anymore estrogen to come in and be broken down.

This means that estrogen levels in your blood immediately begin to rise, putting you at an increased risk of female-related cancers.

AND worse, any half processed estrogen that hasn’t been taken through to the second step and made water-soluble is dumped back into the bloodstream to be dealt with later.

Seriously, all alcohol needs warning labels!

If you need further evidence here is another recent study.

Increasing the number of alcohol-free days you have or switching to mineral water with a slice of lemon or lime is a great place to start.

Please rethink how much you drink. You can read about my journey with alcohol here.