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What is That Alcoholic Drink Doing to Your Kidneys?

By HERWriter
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That Alcoholic Drink: What's It Doing to Your Kidneys? Andy Dean Photography/PhotoSpin

Drinking alcohol affects many parts of the body. Generally speaking, one or two drinks, now and then, have no serious consequences. But heavy drinking does. One area that can be hit hard is the kidneys.

Just what do our kidneys do? One of their major functions is to filter our blood. Kidneys remove anything the body no longer needs. Astonishingly, a healthy kidney can filter around 200 quarts a day, according to AlcoholAnswers.org.

In addition to filtering blood, kidneys do other important tasks. They regulate the volume and composition of body fluid. Excess body fluid is excreted as urine. Urine carries out the materials no longer needed from the body.

Kidneys also help form cells by bringing in nutrients and providing stable conditions for these cells to function.

Drinking alcohol can get in the way of all of this.

Alcohol can damage your kidneys in many ways, from harming cells and enlarging the kidneys themselves, to affecting the various hormones that control kidney function and creating an ionic fluid imbalance in the body.

Sodium, potassium, phosphate and magnesium are types of electrolytes. They make up the body’s ionic fluid. As mentioned our kidneys regulate this fluid. Alcohol disrupts this ability.

Alcohol increases urine production by slowing the release of the antidiuretic hormone. Just like it sounds, this means that alcohol acts like a diuretic. You urinate more — a lot more. This in turn can change the body’s fluid level and disturb the electrolyte balance causing the ionic fluid imbalance.

When you urinate more and disturb the electrolyte balance, the concentration of electrolytes in the blood increases. This can result in dehydration.

Alcohol also makes it difficult for our kidneys to filter harmful substances from blood. Alcohol is actually one of those substances. It can cause changes in kidney function and make them less able to filter your blood.

Chronic alcohol drinking can cause liver diseases. Liver diseases can have even more negative consequences on the kidneys, such as kidney failure.

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