Welcome to Dry January!

After the inevitable excesses of Christmas and the new year we are urged, once more, to give up alcohol for January. I’ve just returned from visiting my brother in Dubai. Apart from a chance to catch up with family and the fabulous weather (29 degrees, not a cloud in the sky) one of the most enjoyable things about visiting a Muslim country is the public absence of alcohol.

There are some immediate and very obvious benefits: no problem with drunkenness on the streets, no empty beer cans and bottles lying around, no Thursday and Friday night public carousing and city centre disturbances. Walking through the City with my 11-year-old son after an evening meal was a pleasure rather than an embarrassment.

The benefits don’t stop there: meals out are a lot cheaper without the addition of wine to the menu. Instead, most restaurants offer a range of fresh juices and cocktails, a variety of teas and other infusions and traditional drinks made with yogurt and buttermilk, served bitter, sour or sweet to perfectly complement traditional food, rich in spices. Certainly a lot more imaginative (and healthy) than the range of commercial, sugary drinks that restaurants serve up here.

And there are other good reasons to quit alcohol. Giving up just one pint of beer and one bottle of wine a week will save you £65 a month and reduce your calorie intake by about 3,000. You’d have to run 30 miles to burn that lot off!

There are much more profound benefits to reducing alcohol consumption. Every hour, someone loses a loved one due to alcohol. Over a million people a year are admitted to hospital with alcohol related problems and, after smoking and obesity, it is the third-largest, lifestyle risk-factor for disease and death. Liver disease (an inevitable consequence of excessive alcohol consumption) is one of the few major causes of premature death that is on the increase. Alcohol costs the NHS £3.5bn per year and the nation about £8bn in crime. Sure it raises the government much more in revenue, but the cost in blighted lives and destroyed relationships that alcohol causes is incalculable.

A few years ago I was working for the British Liver Trust, promoting their Love your Liver campaign, a roadshow that offered a free live health test to members of the public. I will never forget the look on one woman’s face as a consultant explained to her that her liver health was now critical ‘But I’m not an alcoholic,’ she protested. The consultant tried to explain that her one glass of wine a night that helped her relax hadn’t given her liver the alcohol-free chance to recover that it needs each week. Without knowing it she had been drinking herself to death.

Dry January? No problem….