Welcome to Paging Dr. Gupta. This is something new that we're trying, where I get to answer

the health questions that you've been asking. Ever since we started doing the podcast, we would get a lot of

you sending in your questions, and we thought we should create a space to just try and answer

as many of those questions as we can.

So this is going to be our shot at that, and we're going to start off with something that I'm sure you've heard about, dry January. So how many of you did dry January? Well, if you

manage maybe a damp January, I'm guessing that you're still feeling better. But the question that we've been

getting a lot of is what if you want to keep that going? How big a thing is this? And what we're

learning is that more and more people, particularly younger generations, they are starting to

choose non-alcoholic drinks all year long. And I got to tell you, as a father of three teenagers,

this is something that I can totally get behind. Now, what I will tell you is that people who are

doing this, drinking non-alcoholic drinks all year long, they do still want those drinks to look

and to feel and to even taste like the real thing. And what they're

finding out is that if it's done right, they don't miss the alcohol. That's the key. It's the whole

experience, the look, the feel, the taste. But even without the alcohol, they just don't seem to

miss it. They feel that it's just as social, just as fun.

And of course, again, we know that alcohol is not healthy for us. It is linked to all these

various things, including high blood pressure and heart disease and strokes and dementia.

In 2003, the World Health Organization, they said something that caught a lot of people's attention,

no level of alcohol consumption is safe. The Surgeon General recently weighed in, saying that

alcohol could actually increase your cancer risk. So there's all sorts of reasons not to drink

alcohol. And recently, I jumped on this mocktail train as well. I love a phony

nogroni, for example. But again, if it's prepared just the right way, proper glass,

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