Ah, January, month of overnight asceticism and extra-good intentions, the time of year when even the most unapologetic sybarites are apt to find themselves pale, jiggling, naked and goose-pimpled before a full-length mirror, seriously hungry and stone-cold sober after swearing off of butts, wine and carbs at the crack of New Year's Day.
Okay, it was more like 4:25 a.m. in my case, but you see what I'm getting at. January is the month when, as my high-school health nurse used to say, abstinence really does seem like the best protection. It's the goyish period of atonement, a time for joyless repent, sober reflection and tedious amounts of water and yoga. Four miserable weeks of doing nothing we love and everything we hate, all for the sake of our health and well-being. But is going booze-free in January all that good for us?
For ages, I cut out alcohol during the first month of the year, combining my wineless tedium with some sort of new age "cleanse" involving an absence of wheat and dairy and a plethora of milk thistle and herbs meant to purge the evil spirits out of my lower intestine. I told myself that I was doing it to "give my liver a holiday" and to "embrace a simpler lifestyle" when the truth of the matter was I just wanted to prove that I could. Like most habitual drinkers, I was secretly convinced I was a raging alcoholic because of my half-a-bottle-a-night-with-dinner habit - a habit that, according to Health Canada, puts me squarely in the category of "hazardous, dependent" drinkers. In France, of course, I'd be considered perfectly normal. But the French eat six servings of cheese a day and end up looking like Carla Bruni, so who can figure them out?
When I was into them, these January detoxes never left me feeling anything but bored and grumpy. I now know why: They were useless. Which is why, this year, I'm abstaining from abstinence. In the name of good health, I humbly suggest that you do the same.
Increasingly, we live in a culture that promotes the January detox as a balm to body and soul, but really it is a sign of our increasingly conflicted relationship with alcohol - a substance that, approached respectfully, can do a person far more good than harm.
While a recent study by researchers at the University of Southern California showed that most popular detox programs do little or nothing to help the human body eliminate toxins, the embrace of January abstinence continues unabated.
Most health-food stores, for instance, now have an entire section devoted to "cleanse" kits meant to help those abstaining from alcohol purge their bodies of toxins. In Finland, Alcohol-Free January is a government-funded pilot project to combat that nation's alcohol-abuse problem. And on Facebook, you can join a club called Alcohol Free January, which describes itself as "a group for people who normally drink like fish who want to make sure they don't have a drinking problem. The objective is to spend the entire month of January without consuming alcohol ... if you're able."
All of this flies in the face of the USC study, which concludes that "the suggestion that elimination of noxious agents is enhanced because of this regimen is categorically unsubstantiated and runs counter to our understanding about human physiology and biochemistry."
Indeed, undergoing the January detox isn't just useless, but also potentially bad for us. Just as research proves that, over time, yo-yo dieting only makes us fatter, so too it appears that a binge-purge approach to alcohol only makes us drunker.
According to David J. Hanson, a professor emeritus at New York State University and an internationally recognized expert in the sociology of drinking, "Prohibition was what created the culture of heavy episodic drinking in the first place because it made alcohol into an illicit substance." Today, he says, cultures that embrace a philosophy of "continuous moderate daily alcohol consumption" tend to have both lower levels of heart disease and alcohol-related fatalities. "This we know: It's a U-shaped grid. The moderate consumption of alcohol is associated with better health and greater longevity than either abstaining or abusing."
Hanson points out that, in the United States, many dry counties actually have higher alcohol-related fatalities than neighbouring wet ones.
Similarly, countries with looser drinking laws (such as age limits, licensing restrictions, etc.) seem to have fewer problems with the demon liquor as well. In these cultures, he says, there tend to be certain commonalities, which are:
1. They tend to see alcohol as a neutral substance, neither inherently good nor bad.
2. They tend to view the abuse of alcohol as unacceptable, and the choice to either abstain or drink moderately as equally acceptable.
3. People in these cultures learn to drink in the safe confines of their home from their parents, rather than with peers in the fraternity house.
As you might expect, Hanson is not a proponent of the January detox, either medically or socially. Quite the opposite, he says, "the serious disadvantage of a January detox is that it would convey the false belief that moderate drinking requires any detoxification. To the contrary, people should understand the value of drinking regularly in moderation."
In other words, a little booze goes a long way. Anyway, that's what I'm telling myself, as I pour a big glass of wine on this cold, dark January night.