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BORG drinking How dangerous is excessive drinking · Kvetch & Release

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  Hey, folks, we're back. John Lecke here on AM eight hundred CKLW.
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  Hope you're all doing well at this eleven thirty three on May twenty.
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  First, listen, I think I'm young enough to still be a generation that
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  knows what the BORG is, you know, far reaching space faring technologically advanced
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  assimilation empire. That's not what we're talking about today, Although you're going to
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  be hearing BORG a lot right now. If you're younger, it probably means
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  something far different to you than what I just put out, instead of meaning
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  a spacefaring civilization. BORG stands for the black out rage gallon. According to
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  the National Capital Poison Center in Washington, the term refers to in concoction often
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  prepared in a gallon sized plastic jug that contains vodka or other distilled alcohol,
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  water, a flavor enhancer, and an electrolyte powder or drink. Borgs are
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  often drunk at outside day parties, and they're, you know, a little
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  bit risky because it's a lot of alcohol over what could be, you know,
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  whether it's a longer period time or shorter period of time, still an
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  excessive amount. Joining me right now to discuss this new phenomenon and why it's
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  a dangerous trend is Montreal emergency medicine specialist, doctor Mitch Schulman, Doctor,
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  how are you today? Very fine? And I believe resistance is futile.
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  Well, I would agree with you as well, but let's hope not in
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  the case of these borg drinks. Okay, we need to have some resistance,
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  it seems. I was talking about a story a couple of weeks ago
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  about a distillery in a Saskatchewan that was selling gallons of vodka and then they
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  sort of got their hands slapped because of it. But this is not that
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  directly, but it's still sort of a parallel. I don't think that the
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  distillery was expecting anyone to go and drink the entire gallon of vodka in one
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  day. This here sounds, of course, it's being catered towards a college
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  market. It's a backyard party drink. What would be some of the issues
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  if you're going and adding a huge amount of alcohol electrolyte powders and drinks and
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  then being outside all day in the heat exactly, And so the danger is
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  too much alcohol too quickly, even if you are a drinker, and one
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  can define that in various different ways. The science now shows us that your
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  liver can only break down sugar at the equivalent about a drink an hour.
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  You take in more than that, and you overwhelm the liver. Okay,
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  who cares? Well. The problem is that alcohol and spills into your bloodstream
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  with all the nasty things that can happen. It directly affects your brain,
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  It affects your ability to think and to be coordinated, can put you into
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  a coma. And the danger with the coma is you vomit and you aspirate,
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  so you can actually die of alcohol intoxication. I know people just take
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  it for granted because it's so ubiquitous. It's everywhere everyone drinks. Well,
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  the truth of the matter is you're lucky enough not to work in an emergency
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  room, and you're lucky enough not to see people who come in deathly ill
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  as a result of too much alcohol in too fast, and it's extremely dangerous.
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  Now you may have heard it in a different formulation. So instead of
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  pouring too much alcohol into this gallon drug and swinging it all during the day
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  and making it worse because they're not eating, making it worse because they're dehydrated
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  binge drinking is a variant on the same thing, and that's where a man
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  or a woman drinks more than four for a female five for a male within
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  two hours, and again it overwhelms the ability of the body's livered to metabolize
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  it. It gets absorbed, and it can lead to severe complications aside from
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  just passing out, which in and of itself push to at risk. So
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  very scary. I don't know where people come up with these things, you
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  know, you have to wonder does no one have common sense anymore? Or
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  because you're young, you just assume you're immortal and nothing will affect you.
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  Well, now you sound like you're Mitch Album here. There's no common sense
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  in our generation. And I think there's a gap between both of our generations,
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  maybe by a bit, but you know, I honestly thought that the
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  younger generations, and I mean, I guess we're just going to be speaking
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  anecdotally right now, I thought that younger generations were decreasing alcohol consumption compared to
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  older generations that traditionally went through schools. I wonder, you know what you
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  see in as you said, you know, in emergency rooms in hospitals,
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  in Montreal, just the same numbers. I don't think things have changed dramatically
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  at all. The good news is because I'm in Montreal, McGill atract's Americans,
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  who's legal drinking ages twenty one, well for most Canadians either eighteen or
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  nineteen. So you can see the difference in having been exposed to alcohol for
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  a couple of years and I hope learned through good example how to control your
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  use of it, compared to these kids who have never had access legally or
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  safely, never been I guess supervised, never been given the opportunity to understand
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  what alcohol does too, and they get they can get very sick. Frosh
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  week here at the Gift is a period of time which we all do not
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  look forward to in the emergency room because we know we're going to see some
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  really sick kids. And I know all of you are kind of shaking your
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  heads, going look at doctor Schulman waving his finger, that old fuddy duddy.
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  The truth of the matter is, yeah, we drank when we were
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  younger. Yeah you'd get sick to your stomach, Yes you'd be hung over
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  the next day. But it was rare and exceptional that we drank to the
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  point of passing out. It was rare where the goal of drinking was to
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  pass out. And that's what's different right now. In drinking alcohol a beer,
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  a bottle of wine, glass of wine, hard spirits, you basically
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  know pretty much how much you're taking. And I'm having a beer, a
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  glass of wine, a But when you're putting it this concoction together inside this
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  gallon jug, what's the concentration of alcohol there? And I'm willing to bet
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  it's much more than the equivalent of one drink an hour or one drink every
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  two or three hours. And I'm sure these kids aren't drinking something else like
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  water or juice in between to dilute out the effects. And so now it
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  just only makes logical sense. You don't have to be me to understand that
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  there's a danger here. And I think it's a responsibility that we have as
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  parents to kind of say, look, I know you're going to drink,
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  let's talk about it. Forbidding something never works telling them that it's not safe.
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  And this is why, as long as you do it properly and carefully,
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  you don't look like an idiot who knows nothing about what they're doing.
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  Hopefully you're giving them the wisdom based on your own experience and what you know.
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  You know, I've been thinking a lot recently about how we're dealing with
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  the first COVID class graduating right now it's been four years, and thinking about
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  how so many activities on campus didn't occur, so much of that social learning
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  experiences that they didn't really happen. And I wonder if you have concern about,
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  you know, this cohort entering out of the schooling environment into the broader
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  society that we all live in. You see it all the way. You
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  see the way from the little kids who instead of going to daycare or kindergartener
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  nursery, missed out on that missed out on the socialization. And you can
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  see these kids they're a little bit more reticent to interact with people. They
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  are a little bit i'll say in quotation Marks Shire, a little bit more
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  withdrawn. Now we can overcome that because with time and proper exposure and support
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  and education, little kids are very malleable. But as you get older,
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  how much more able to adjust are you? And to be honest with you,
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  part of the university experience is not just the book learning it's the social
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  skills that you develop interacting with a very different group of people than the people
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  you probably went to high school with in a very different environment where you're much
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  more expected to behave yourself as an adult and take on adult responsibilities. So
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  it's an essential part of the growing up maturation process. And all the studies
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  have shown that people's brains do not mature until there's somewhere between the ages of
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  twenty one or twenty four. I know the women out there are saying,
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  yeah, some guys never mature, We got that, But I'm just saying,
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  logically, medically, the brain matures between twenty one and twenty four.
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  This is why alcohol drinking to access and that age group is so dangerous.
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  You're affecting a developing brain which hasn't really fully formed. And two, that's
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  why a lack of that experience in that age group. And that's why I
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  think it's really important that we do whatever we can to enhance the period now
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  to give them the opportunity to form those connections, whether it's going out to
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  look for a job, whether it's at the workplace where they're now working to
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  try and capitalize on the missed opportunities to try and create beneficial and useful social
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  connection as they're moving out into the real world. These are things that we
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  all need to learn, of course, and I think one thing that a
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  lot of people have learned and then I'll let you go after this, is
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  that you know, a glass of wine is good for you on a daily
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  basis. Wish is so, so it sounds like it's not, and that's
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  actually, you know, just some maybe propaganda that we've been hearing for too
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  long. No, we really did think that people say, oh, I
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  see medicine at flip flops, but we don't. We learn more, and
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  so we evolved we don't flip flop. Initially, we thought that there were
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  studies that showed that people who were drinking a small amount of alcohol, usually
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  red wine, seemed to be living longer. And the classic was what we
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  call the French paradox. These were a population that smoked, that had cheese
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  with a lot of saturated fats in it, and bread and didn't really seem
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  to do anything, and yet they lived as long as the rest is Aha,
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  maybe it's something magical in red wine. Well, it turned out we
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  misunderstood the data. Number one, it wasn't really the red wine French paradox
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  effect number one number two. As we started looking at data, we started
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  realizing, there's a lovely review a couple of years back in the Lancet looking
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  at death rates related to alcohol consumption, and don't you know the risk of
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  cancer, the risk of all sorts of things shoots up dramatically with any alcohol
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  intake. And that's why you've heard that we've changed our recommendations from going from
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  three or five or seven a week to maybe one a week, if at
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  all, and why we've come up with the absolute prohibition against drinking if you're
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  pregnant or nursing, because we know the effect that that might have on the
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  baby. Now, I don't want to sound like, you know, oh
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  there he is a guy and he's yelling into I get it. I really
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  do alcohol so ingrained in our culture, really, but I think you need
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  to make an informed decision. So you drink. Drink when it is meaningful,
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  it's part of a dinner, get together or something like that, and
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  do not drink to excess, and do not do it regularly. I realize
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  full well that to change our culture, to change our understanding, is going
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  to take a couple of generations at least, and so I'm not going to
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  be here pointing a finger at anyone. What I'm going to tell you is
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  just know the stats, know the science. As we know more, maybe
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  we'll change things, but for now, enjoy, but enjoy responsibly. And
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  now now I sound like an ad on TV or radio, and I apologize.
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  That's okay. We need the public service announcements every now and then.
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  Maybe the French paradox was just due to the cheese. Who knows. We
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  actually think that we misread the data, misunderstood it, and they were a
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  lot more active. So the farmer who was having the cheese and the wine
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  and everything was actually in the fields all day, working really hard, and
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  it was the physical exercise, the physical effort on a regular day that was
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  really probably saving them. We now know that being sedentary is as dangerous as
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  smoking or anything else, and we think that may have been something that we
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  didn't realize at the time, that being active every day. Look at the
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  cooso called blue zones where people live very old. You have many more one
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  hundred year old people than you have elsewhere. And the number one thing in
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  all of these environments aside from a good diet is exercise into their eighties and
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  their nineties. These are people who are still working in their garden, working
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  on the farm, moving, getting up and doing things. And I think
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  that's a key message that we didn't really understand the importance of until recently.
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  If you'll indulge me just one last question, then I promise I will let
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  you go. As it does get warmer right now, people hopefully are not
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  doing this borg drinking. I've seen a new trend of people, you know,
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  mixing energy drinks with alcohol, or you know, shooting back a lot
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  of energy drinks while they're drinking. What are some of the risks with that,
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  Well, it seems, you know, paradoxical because you're trying to just
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  I guess, defeat the purpose of the alcohol. But maybe you just want
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  to stay up longer to have more fun. But what can it do to
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  It doesn't work. It just makes you an agitated, angry drunk. So
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  it doesn't keep you from falling asleep. It increases the effects of the alcohol
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  on your heart. It makes you literally an agitated, miserable, angry drunk
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  as opposed to whatever else you would have been otherwise. So I tell people,
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  if you're going to combine an energy drink with alcohol to it because you
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  enjoy the flavor, don't do it because you think you're counteracting any of the
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  effects of the alcohol, because you are not. You're just adding the effects
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  of the energy drink to whatever effects. And don't forget, we used to
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  call it holiday heart. If someone drinks an inappropriate amount for them, they
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  can develop a heart rhythm problem called atrial fibrillation. And I've seen this supposedly
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  healthy people. They've been drinking too much and lo and behold they develop.
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  Is when you add on an energy drink, you're increasing the stress on the
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  heart at the same time. So it really, really really makes absolutely no
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  sense, unless I know there are some people who really enjoy the taste.
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  That's the same way you might mix, you know, orange juice with you
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  with your alcohol or cranberry juice. You're doing it for the taste. I
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  hope that that makes sense, But don't do it for any other reason.
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  It's not going to get you anywhere other than being, as you said,
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  an agitated, miserable, angry drunk. Doesn't sound like a good person I
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  want to be around. Sounds like someone I want to be around an alliser.
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  Well, doctor Schulman, I want to thank you so much for your
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  time today. It's an important topic and I'm glad that we can find some
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  humor throughout it, but we wanted to, of course get this out on
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  the airwaves for people to know about my pleasure. You have a great day.
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  Thank you you as well.