During his time in the hospital, Flair’s doctors removed part of his bowel and inserted a pacemaker, a small device that’s placed in your chest or abdomen to help steady your heartbeat. He’s recovering in Atlanta, where he can barely sip a glass of water without the help of a nurse.
Flair never drank on the job, but throwing more than a few back after work was his way of getting to know his fellow wrestlers. When he suffered a particularly rough injury or felt pain from long days in the ring, Flair turned to his favorite bar instead of medicine.
“I didn’t think I was an alcoholic, but obviously I was,” he told PEOPLE. (Check out his interview below.)
Flair’s experience is just one example of how drinking too much alcohol can mess with your heart health. Excessive drinking can raise your triglycerides, or the levels of fat in your blood, a known risk factor for heart attack and stroke. It can also lead to high blood pressure, heart disease, and even sudden cardiac death, according to the American Heart Association.
Many guys tend to go overboard with booze. Roughly 23 percent of adult men report binge drinking five times a month, glugging eight drinks per binge, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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For Flair, suffering these consequences was enough to make him swear off the stuff for good. “I’ll never drink again,” he confirms. “I never want to go through this again.”
The current U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommend that men have no more than two drinks per day—but even that amount of booze can raise you risk of atrial fibrillation, a type of irregular heartbeat that quadruples your risk of stroke and triples your risk of heart failure. In fact, here’s how drinking a little booze each day may be killing you.
Want to keep your ticker healthy for years to come? Here are 100 ways you can protect your heart.
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