Dry January

Here we are again, it’s early January and the idea of giving up the booze for a month seems not just possible, but almost attractive: no hangovers, cutting down your calorie intake and staunching the flow of money from your wallet to the pub or wine merchant; you can see the appeal.

However, as well as being the launchpad of New Year resolutions, January is the longest month of the year. I know, other months also have 31 days, but they just aren’t as long as January – fact.

In recent years the notion of Blue Monday, falling on the Monday of the last full week of January, has taken hold. This is supposedly officially the most depressing day of the year.

By my calculations, this will fall on Monday 26^th January this year - though it might depend whether you count Sunday as the end of the week, in which case Blue Monday will be on 19^th January. It matters not; the whole thing is almost certainly entirely spurious and at best a bit of pseudo-science. But it doesn’t take much imagination to appreciate how the combination of short days, cold weather and a general feeling of, how shall I put it, being skint, will tend to weigh on one and contribute to a general feeling of misery.

Whether on Blue Monday or not, many people who had begun January with the intention of staying off the demon drink will fall off the alcohol-free wagon before the month is out. In case this could be you, would you like some good news?

I don’t think anyone should worry about not managing to lay off the drink for a month. There is no firm medical evidence that an entire month of abstinence is the best way to boost your liver health. Our livers need time to recover from alcoholic (and rich food) over-induglence. But even the most sorely abused livers have done all the recovering they are going to do in 3-5 days. Abstaining for a month is much more about proving to ourselves – and others – that we can do it. Might it also even be just a teensy weensy bit macho?

But the smooth running of the universe hangs on the premise that where there is good news, there is also bad news: dear reader, our livers would appreciate a few alcohol-free days, not just every month, but every week.

I’m not dissing the idea of dry January – and anyone who has signed up to Cancer Research UK’s month-long Dryathlon and will raise money for charity as a result of their temperance is to be congratulated. However, I don’t think those of us who still have a drink or two in January should be made to feel like failures. I’d like to promote the idea of a light, rather than completely dry, January. Perhaps it should be damp January? Or perhaps not.

Non-alcoholic drinks I like:

OK, not the longest list in the world I admit, but here goes:

Lemonade punch

This is refreshing, not too sweet and feels quite healthy

2 pints of strong tea

Juice of 3 lemons

½ cup of sugar

Sprigs of mint

1 pint of ginger ale

Cool the tea and add the lemon juice, sugar and mint. Add the ginger ale just before serving. (Originally published in Vogue Cocktails, published 1982)

Mulled apple juice

It’s comforting to have a warm, and warming, soft drink in the winter months.

1 litre apple juice

Strips of orange peel

1 cinnamon stick

Sugar or honey, to taste

Put the apple juice, orange peel and cinnamon stick in a pan and warm gently for 5-10 minutes. Sweeten, or not, to your taste. (Originally published in Good Food Magazine, 2009)

For those aiming to stay dry this month, cheers and I’ll see you on the other side.

    

Do you detox?

Now is the time that many of us, for the only time of the year, give some thought to our livers. We toy with the idea of “doing something” and think of giving it a thorough detox as an antidote to the excesses of December.

The British Liver Trust, a fount of knowledge, as you might imagine, informs me that the liver is our largest internal organ and plays a vital role in keeping us alive, carrying out 500 different functions. It is the factory of the body, making proteins, blood clotting factors and products to help with digestion and energy release. Your body uses it as a store for energy and iron; it also purifies the blood of bacteria, by-products of digestion, alcohol and drugs.

It is this last function that interests us, for one month of the year at least, as many of us undertake to lay off the booze in January. The idea of becoming slimmer, shinier and healthier by giving the liver a rest is undoubtedly attractive.

There are those who want to take things further by going on some kind of detox diet. Sipping water and lemon juice during meals in order to aid digestion and thereby support liver function is currently modish – though there's no scientific evidence to support it. Just a glass of water with meals is likely to be just as valuable.

There is some evidence that green tea, with its high levels of antioxidants, can be helpful – if you can stand the taste of the stuff. Much more palatable to me is the finding that coffee can also be supportive of good liver function – guilt-free flat white please.

However, the idea that we need to detox our liver at all is undermined by the British Liver Trust's finding that “there is no evidence that toxins build up in the liver”. So it looks like we don't need to spend more money and energy on investing in the latest snake oil to rid ourselves of the poisons that we've been busy ingesting for the past few weeks.

Nevertheless, we can't avoid the evidence that alcohol does damage our livers and we drinkers could all benefit from giving our systems a few days off to recover.

But a whole month? Come on, January feels like the longest month already, without making it wine-free. Do our systems really need weeks to recover? The official line at the NHS is that even heavy drinkers should be through withdrawal symptoms (let's hope we're not at that stage) and be on the road to liver recovery within 3-5 days.

So a few days off is really all our systems need. Month-long abstinence is much more to do with testing our will power and self-discipline than any proven health benefits. But there are other upsides: alcoholic drinks contain calories, so cut them out and you might find you're slimmer and trimmer – as long as you don't swap the wine for more food!

Alcohol causes dehydration (the root of many a hangover) so cutting it out should result in better skin and overall healthiness. And there's no getting away from the fact that drinking costs money – cutting out the vino could also help with the wallet hangover of Christmas too.

The trouble is, it's easy to view a booze-free start to the year as a deposit in the good behaviour bank and to excuse excesses later in the year with the comforting thought that you did spend a whole 4 ½ weeks off the drink. But of course the body doesn't work that way and what we really should all be doing is avoiding excess and keeping within sensible drinking limits – and a few wine-free days each week of the year should do the trick. Hmmm. I'll keep you posted on that one.