You want to be a father? Better think about quitting alcohol now
What if you could make one lifestyle choice now that could help ensure your future son or daughter had a healthy, happy life?
For the longest time, people believed it was only aspiring mothers who needed to clean up their act before having kids.
But more and more research is showing that it’s actually dad’s health decisions that can have a bigger impact on birth outcomes.
Society is finally coming around to admitting that alcohol is terrible for you in general, but when it came to having kids, the typical recommendation was only that the mother should abstain from drinking while pregnant.
The dads were kind of ignored in the whole thing.
But the more we learn about how long alcohol can stay in your system, the more it feels like those baseline recommendations don’t go far enough.
In fact, a new study shows wannabe fathers should quit drinking alcohol a lot sooner than you might expect.
Long-term effects
Researchers at Texas A&M recently looked at how long the body’s withdrawal process takes and how it might affect the father’s sperm.
In a university news release quoted in this article, the study’s lead author, Dr. Michael Golding, explained:
“When someone is consuming alcohol on a regular basis and then stops, their body goes through withdrawal, where it has to learn how to operate without the chemical present.
“What we discovered is that a father’s sperm are still negatively impacted by drinking even during the withdrawal process, meaning it takes much longer than we previously thought for the sperm to return to normal.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done to get a hard answer, but we know that sperm are made over the course of 60 days, and the withdrawal process takes at least one month. So, my estimate would be to wait at least three months.”
That may feel like a long time, given how ubiquitous alcohol is in our society and how little people talk about paternal health choices.
While there’s still a lot of work to be done in this area to determine hard numbers, I’m very much a probabilities guy.
And if you ask me, anything that increases the odds of having healthy children is probably worth thinking about.
Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please give it a clap or two so others can find it!
In search of something else to read? Here are my top 5 trending stories:
- 1 fitness trap Ryan Reynolds overcomes to stay super jacked at 47
- 1 reason you’ll succeed (or fail) making big money writing online
- 1 secret Arnold Schwarzenegger morning trick to stay jacked at 76 (NEW)
- The real truth of making big money writing online (they’re lying)
- One NEW reason I’m hyper-motivated to change my life writing online