Alcohol

Alcohol has been used to comfort people who were sick, to preserve food for later use as well as a form of currency during the middle ages that was used to pay of any debts people might have had with ale. Some regarded it as a drink of evil while others claimed it was a gift from God.

History
While we are unsure as to when alcohol was first discovered, we can be sure that people probably discovered this new and important beverage not long after abandoning their hunter style way of life and moving on to farming to sustain themselves. The mostly like explanation to how people long ago discovered alcohol is that when they stored grapes inside containers to keep them to eat next time, the grapes fermented and produced alcohol. After this, alcohol would have spread quickly as most people would have seen the potential market for these types of goods. The earliest artifacts that have been found that are related to drinking alcohol is 12000 year old stone beer mugs that people used to drink alcohol from.

Alcohol's bad effects
Some bad effects of Alcohol may be mild while oothers may be rather serious. I will give some examples now.

1.There is a greater chance to get lung infections
2.high blood pressure
3. Enlargement of the heart
4.Brain injury as well as hullucinations and confusion
5.There are also chances of contracting liver cancer.

The good things about Alcohol
While abusing alcohol may be seriously detrimental to your health, complete abstinence from alcohol does not improve your health either. Studies have shown that if people take alcohol every once in a while they have better health and greater longevity than people who do not drink alcohol and definitely more than people who abuse it. Furthermore, in history when people did not have proper analgesic for people in pain they gave them alcohol to drink to blur their mind a bit to diminish their pain slightly. In the middle ages alcohol was absolutely essential as the people's staple crop was grain-based thus they rarely took any meat resulting in many of the people being malnourished. That is why people then took alcohol to boost their energy a little bit.

Strangely, your perspective and expectations of what you are drinking influences your body and your mind more than what you are actually drinking. For examples, if you give someone a cup of alcohol but you tell him that his drink does not contain any alcohol there usually will be no effect to his mind when he drinks. This also works the other way round where if you lie and tell a person that he is drinking alcohol when actually he is not, he usually would become louder and less inhibited. Thus it is not really what you are drinking but what matters more is what you think you are drinking that will affect you more.

I hope you have learnt some interesting facts in this blog post.