Transcripts

Michael Roizen:
Well, alcohol is a toxin to the liver; it's a poison to the liver. However, it's good for your arteries so there's a balance - it's a half to one drink a night for women, one to two for men.

Dr. Michael Roizen, co-author of the best selling book You, the Owner's Manual, which has just been updated and expanded…

The difference isn't the size of the body or the size of the liver, it's that in fact men have an enzyme that metabolizes half of the alcohol they drink before it gets out of the intestine. And so what happens is when you get a toxin to the liver it damages the liver cells and causes inflammation. Now you normally repair that but if you overwhelm it, if you have too much of that toxin, it causes what we call cirrhosis or liver disease that is not repairable.

If you're an adult, one of the best things you can do to help keep yourself healthy, says Dr. Roizen, is, after talking to your doctor, take two baby aspirin every day.

The aspirin decreases your risk of heart disease, stroke, memory loss, impotence, even wrinkling of the skin by about thirty-five percent and it decreases your risk of colon cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer also by about thirty-five percent. And every other gastrointestinal cancer (that's stomach cancer) and rectal cancer by about forty percent and throat cancer by about forty percent.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.