I just want to point out the amazing amount of alcohol you'd have to ingest in a short time to get to the 1% BAC referenced in this article.
Obviously there are lots of variables based on your size and individual physiology, but on average, each drink raises your BAC somewhere around .02%.
So, even without accounting for an enlarged liver that processed alcohol more quickly, that driver with a 1% BAC in South Africa must have had around 50 drinks in quick succession, then gotten behind the wheel.
Even if you were drinking liquor, that's basically downing two bottles of whisky in under an hour.
Plenty to kill the average person, but apparently not enough to keep this driver from getting behind the wheel.
The California chart states "Fewer than 5 persons out of 100 will exceed these values".
The article you linked contains charts from the Texas ABC which do not indicate what percentile they measure. The original source [1] is a dead link but it's still available in the Wayback machine [2], where the PDF states "Note: The figures are averages and may vary based on the amount of food in your stomach."
The difference in these charts in no way "implies that at least one source is lying via statistics", just that you are attempting to compare different statistics dealing with something that's going to be quite variable from individual to individual. IMO, the 95th percentile is a better approach, if your intention is to give people a rough intuition for how much might be too much.
I get your point but that chart is overestimating so much that it misses the point entirely, anyone who actually checked their % after a few drinks would notice it immediately.
After having a "typical" longneck-format beer I'd be at 0.04 and already in the "unsafe to drive" threshold. This is not bragging by the way, don't drink and drive, but we should have a discussion over values that actually make sense.
Whenever I've looked at the BAC chart and compared it to my drinking, I discover that I would be incredibly uncomfortable driving while anywhere near .08 BAC, so I always assumed it was underestimated somehow... or else people are allowed to be way drunker and still drive than seems safe.
When I was drinking heavily, I bought an evidence grade breathalyzer. I would use it as directed (wait 15m after eating or drinking, etc) and find that at a .08 I felt fine (which means nothing, obviously) but also I could pass FSTs and no one around me (sober or drunk) could tell that I had been drinking.
Not that anecdotes are data, just to say it 100% depends on the person and the circumstances. Alcohol hits me much harder now.
I think it's the latter. I've tried a few times with a breathalyzer (that I got off of amazon for pretty cheap, so no guarantee on accuracy. Although it was consistent) while drinking and I was pretty shocked at how drunk I felt while still being under 0.08. I always assumed the safe limit would be a beer or 2, after which I'd be driving under the influence. Turns out drinking 5 beers over an hour or 2 I was still only around 0.05.
In unrelated news, driving deaths per inhabitant or per km are also substantially lower in Europe (2x, 5x, etc, depends on country and metric - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...). Not only due to blood alcohol limits of course, but those changes are symptomatic of an effort to change the rules to actually affect road accident deaths.
That’s interesting. I just looked at this chart and would be incredibly comfortable driving after drinking the maximum number of drinks on the chart (5) which would place me at 0.15 minus say .04 (over 3 hours, minus 0.01 per 45 minutes) or 0.11. Perhaps you’re just not a big drinker?
I'd just point out that this five drinks in three hours is one drink more than the rule of thumb often given out of two drinks in the first hour then one drink per hour afterwards. It's the rare 200 lb person that has 5 beers during a football/baseball/soccer game and is "very definitely impaired." Sobriety limits are justifiably geared towards the lower end to accommodate light-weight drinkers. This is even pointed out on the chart by noting that this is a 95th percentile drunkenness/BAC (i.e., 95% of people are LESS drunk/have a lower BAC than shown or, alternatively, 5% of people are MORE drunk than shown).
Exactly. No one I know would describe me as a lightweight, but when I have 2 drinks in 40 minutes, I'm very well aware that my reaction time and my ability to notice things is reduced to extent that I'd feel like a jackass getting behind the wheel of a car, even if society deems it legal.
That presumably depends on where you live. For example:
> In the UK, driving or attempting to drive whilst above the legal limit of 0.08% BAC in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and 0.05% BAC in Scotland or unfit through drink carries a maximum penalty of six months' imprisonment, a fine of up to £5,000 and a minimum twelve months' disqualification.
Random, I guess, but what does "fewer than 5 in 100 will exceed these values" mean? Does that mean 5/100 would be more drunk than what's listed there? Less drunk? "Exceed" the weight on the high end?
Don't neglect the .01% you get back after 40 minutes. Otherwise it is as if you are considering a scenario where 2 to 3 drinks are being downed in quick succession.
.08 after two drinks would be .04 per drink, so that's still 25 drinks. I don't drink personally (and never have in the past), but that still seems quite high to me!
Considering the rate of obesity, .02 per drink might be more common than one would think. That said, people should calculate it for themselves than use rules of thumb.
I'm not convinced of the values in that table. I think they are being very conservative. My calculations using a BAC formula are different. For example, the .02 per drink seems to work for men weighing 215lbs.
I had to check wikipedia and I am very much dismay to report that it appears they're discontinuing what some may consider to be the topmost of high gravity malt liquor, 211 Steel Reserve Triple Export (a segment of 211 Steel Reserve)
I have a strong objection to how high the alcohol content of many drinks is these days.
Higher levels of alcohol can disguise bad or cheap processes. For example, these days red wines are often 14% - 14.5% alcohol or even higher and these percentages are pretty universal irrespective of which region of the world they come from. In decades past the equivalent wines would have been only 12% - 12.5%. (Remember, top first growth Bordeaux reds were traditionally 12.5% - it's the extra ageing that makes them great (at least in part) - not the extra alcohol.)
The spirity character of additional alcohol adds extra zest to a poorly made wine. For instance, a few extra percent alcohol can make up for the much shorter maturity (cask) times
that makers allow for wines these days. If anything, we need research to make wines, beers etc. of comparable or even better quality but with even lower alcohol, but there seems precious little interest in that.
In essence, money again trumps health considerations.
No, I'm not a wowser, I've an empty one liter bottle of 56% proof cask-stength single malt Bowmore scotch sitting on a shelf to remind me how nice it was. But that's not the point!
I have just under ten years of AA (and sobriety) under my belt, so I have heard a lot of war stories. I can't remember ever hearing anyone claim more than about 0.65% BAC. 1% sounds more than a little extreme.
I climbed over a wall in a police station to get into the loo to pee at .25. Drank a litre of water, climbed back over, sat on a bench and waited for someone to give me the drill. Leaving out a lot of details, wound up buying a piano. I don't drink and drive, though. That's mad.
You are obviously a free climber of some renown! I once sprang from a 2nd floor balcony and landed in a roll. I don't want to think about the amount of alcohol that was involved. Way over. I try to tell that as a cautionary tale. But then, not a scratch. Ok. Now, back to AA.
Not really, but it was a couple of years before I discovered that climbing was a sport and there were climbing gyms. When I was a tiny kid, I’d climb trees and rocks like crazy. Used to scare the piss out of my parents.
If you're pounding shots in a drinking game or just hitting the Economy-sized bottle of Bacardi rum directly, it's fairly easy to create a situation where you've gotten behind the wheel buzzed and it all catches up to once you're in motion.
You'd have to literally take those shots and go out to your car in the next few minutes to get surprised like that, which... I guess people would do, but it's not that easy. Pounding shots catches up with you very quickly.
I've definitely had experiences where I managed to queue up a profound amount of alcohol intoxication, becoming realized abruptly after enough time had passed to switch bars on foot.
In one specific instance, I promptly became incapacitated before even receiving my first drink at the new bar, falling off a bar stool and vomiting on the floor, unable to stand again, let alone walk. The bar-tender was convinced I was overdosing on some hard drug apparently and kicked us all out for being junkies, because I went from walking in perfectly normal and ordering a drink, to this complete disaster on the floor, in the time it took her to prepare our drinks... It must have been a 10-20 minute delay spent between bars on foot that time. The first bar specialized in stiff sweet cocktails, where they mask stupidly high alcohol content with sugary syrup. IIRC it was called Sugar Lounge (in SF). And I have very low tolerance not being much of a drinker, if you've got tolerance I imagine you can push that time-to-incapacitated delay out quite a bit.
> You'd have to literally take those shots and go out to your car in the next few minutes to get surprised like that, which... I guess people would do, but it's not that easy. Pounding shots catches up with you very quickly.
This is South Africa we're talking about. He was probably drinking in the car, while driving.
About 10 years ago I called an ambulance for a friend at a party. Everyone had said just to get a taxi for him, so I did. When the taxi arrived I realised I couldn't put him in it and called an ambulance instead.
He had seizures on the way to the hosptial, and was blood tested at 0.7% BAC. He woke up 12 hours later and was still 0.2% BAC (which is really drunk).
I had a similar situation in a college dorm at age 18. My friend didn't want to get in trouble so just tried to babysit me. I had severe alcohol poisoning and was sick for days. I am still good friends with that guy, but have realized I need to say no to him quite a bit.
Honestly if you are in America, he _might_ have done you a favor as the emergency ride to the hospital costs about 5k (not great for college students), let alone the medical bill. It's always better safe than sorry though.
You have never seen an alcoholic chug liquor like its water I take it? Long term alcoholics, talking decades+ here not youthful overindulgence, become incredibly tolerant and can consume huge amounts in ways that would make a normal person wretch. These are people who have altered their body chemistry enough that withdrawal is deadly.
"Long term alcoholics, talking decades+ <...> become incredibly tolerant and can consume huge amounts in ways that would make a normal person wretch."
That I can attest to. Only two weeks ago a longtime friend of mine died of cirrhosis of the liver and it was doubly horrible as it was very difficult to visit him in hospital due to COVID restrictions (although he wasn't infected as such).
The amount of alcohol he could put away horrified me. I'd often see him at functions and if I poured him a drink and I didn't fill his glass to the brim then he'd get irritated. The amount of alcohol he could consume and still remain coherent staggered me (if I'd consumed the same amount in a single sitting as he was able to then I'd be fully out to it under the table).
Sad really, he was trained as an organic chemist and he knew full well that his liver was being destroyed as it struggled in its first-pass attempt to eliminate the alcohol (that being the partial oxidation of ethanol into poisonous acetaldehyde).
In the mid 90s, I worked for a grocery store doing full time, overnight stock to partially pay for college. One of my co-workers for a period of time, whose name I now forget, was a barely-functional alcoholic. He would show up to work on time most days, and work through his shift. At lunchtime he would disappear for a period of time and he would come back smelling like Listerine.
Because that was his lunch.
A bottle of Listerine.
During the holidays they shifted some of us to a morning shift to continue to put items on shelves to match the holiday demand, and I saw him walk in on his day off, grab a fifth of bourbon and a fifth of vodka in the cheap plastic bottles, walk out, and walk back in about an hour later because he had consumed both bottles in his truck in the parking lot. He wanted a couple more to bring back to his apartment.
And as bad as his drinking was, the reason he had sole custody of his daughter is because his ex-girlfriend was a full blown drug addict and he was good at hiding his drinking from CPS.
My understanding is that serious alcoholics are drunks for days at a time. They go to bed with enough alcohol in their system to be drunk when they wake up, and they keep drinking throughout the day. Having zero alcohol in their system can be life threatening.
That means they can build up to whatever BAC slowly.
That seems low for "the most hardcore" alcoholics. If we exclude the absolute extreme top 1%, I'd wager the 95th percentile of alcoholics begins at 2 fifths (1.5L) of 40% liquor per day. And I might even be underestimating here.
I think anyone who has played with a personal breath test device knows that you can get false readings quite easily, but blood tests are something else altogether.
> In 2004, an unidentified Taiwanese woman died of alcohol intoxication after immersion for twelve hours in a bathtub filled with 40% ethanol. Her blood alcohol content was 1.35%. It was believed that she had immersed herself as a response to the SARS epidemic.
the wrappings were subsequently soaked with 200 ml of 95% (v/v) ethanol. Although the ethanol-soaked cotton was kept covering the skin with rubber sheeting and adhesive tapes for 4–9 hours, no ethanol was measurable in the blood.
The unspoken secret to DUI defense: pay $10k for an expert witness to show up and demand access to the breathalyzer's source code and pertinent documentation. The vendor will refuse and the case will be thrown out.
Nobody wants to talk about the (in)accuracy of breathalyzers.
>Nobody wants to talk about the (in)accuracy of breathalyzers.
That's because like every other bit of tech used to convict people it's designed to err on the side of convicting people not being accurate.
If you want a laugh look up the sensors they use in the alcohol ankle bracelets. Then look up the OEM specs, calibration requirements, usage environment requirements and accuracy claims by the vendors and try and reconcile the two (several research papers have been written about this). The whole industry is lousy.
> The vendor will refuse and the case will be thrown out.
I'm skeptical that a case would be thrown out that easily. I have seen expert witnesses getting chewed by the prosecution on minor details. So what if the source is unavailable. It can be argued that the device is tested and regularly calibrated, and that any inaccuracies found will be minor - and certainly not enough to exonerate the defendant.
Yeah maybe there might be some inaccuracy - but then the defendant failed the standardized field sobriety tests. And the cop is saying that they were visibly drunk. Now what?
> Yeah maybe there might be some inaccuracy - but then the defendant failed the standardized field sobriety tests. And the cop is saying that they were visibly drunk. Now what?
You pay to have a medical expert come in and explain the myriad conditions that can lead to failing the field sobriety tests. It's simply a question of funding. Even if the case isn't dropped the jury will almost certainly have reasonable doubt.
This is partially why, at least in California, major parts of the penalties for DUI are "administrative" in nature and handled by the DMV.
Even if you do get acquitted in criminal court, it's another set of hearings to get your license back ($$$), lose the special "I got a DUI" SR-22 insurance requirement, etc.
The logistics of that got me thinking if there was perhaps instrumentation errors that led to that BAC number. It seems implausible, and not data-centric enough to hang your hat on in a blog post like this.
Depending on the incentive situation instrumentation errors may be the norm and not the exception. The NJ state police got in trouble for that in the past few years. If the calibration error isn't linear and someone shows up blowing a high number you could get a medically insane number on the screen.
It's truly incredible. 0.15% is quite drunk for a typical person and most can't stand at 0.2%. At > 0.3% people often require hospitalization. At 1% it's probably over the LD50 for an alcohol-naive person! Though it seems estimates for that value are rather fuzzy.
>It's truly incredible. 0.15% is quite drunk for a typical person and most can't stand at 0.2%. At > 0.3% people often require hospitalization
Unless you're using insanely puritanical definitions for "quite drunk" and "can't stand" this doesn't check out. One drink is ~0.02 and there's no shortage of college kids will kill 10+ in an hour with no effect other than becoming drunk and a headache the next day.
College kids who routinely have 10+ drinks in an hour probably aren't what the GP had in mind when referring to typical persons.
Obviously words like typical on the one hand and puritanical on the other hand are sort of subjective. The NIH, probably on the more puritanical side, considers more than 4-5 drinks on one occasion (not per hour!) as binge drinking[1], or more precisely any drinking that raises BAC beyond 0.08%. As for typical, some random internet page[2] claims that on average, male college students have 9 drinks per week (not per hour!).
I've been a pretty bad alcoholic the past few years. I'm young though. And I'm fairly heavy set too.
My "high score" on a breathalyzer is 0.4%, and that was black out barfey drunk for me.
When in college, NO ONE I knew was able to reach even close to that. If you treat it like a math problem, sure, 1 drink = 0.02.
But in reality, when you can't walk, your body vomits a lot of it out, and friends stop you from drinking, etc. A college aged person without much tolerance can almost never reach that level.
In my AA, no one has gotten close to that. .6 at the most at their worst.
I'm no saying .4 is realistically attainable with any regularity. I'm saying that 0.15-.2 is not a very exceptional "24hr high score" for anyone who is drinking to get drunk in said 24hr period. It's basically a 12-pack over 1.5 hr or a 6-pack and some shots over two, neither of which are keg stand type crazy levels of consumption.
HN gets a massive stick up its ass if you suggest that there exists a large subset of the population who's alchohol consumption is not along the lines one high end beer per week night and two on the weekends.
I'm not saying that everyone is crushing a 12pack on a Friday night but to say that people can't stand at .2 is an equally outlandish generalization in the other direction.
I'm not sure if there's a regional difference here perhaps, but what volume are the bottles/cans in these 6&12 packs you're both talking about? Sounds like a lot to me whatever it is, but here 500ml is standard (for bottles and cans, draught is pints i.e. 568ml) though 440ml (noticed these recently - 'fridge packs') and 300ml (usually hipster microbrewery stuff, or marketing itself as such) are available.
I don't know why I'm asking really, seems loads even at 300ml. I suppose just to make the point that without specifying it can be read as almost 100% (resp. 50%) off.
Oh, ha. (Also I realised re-reading my comment that I typod/errored in saying 300ml, I meant 330ml. At least for the cans, same as Coke et al., here anyway.)
> My "high score" on a breathalyzer is 0.4%, and that was black out barfey drunk for me.
That was also my high score, I was lucid enough to remember the police bringing me to the hospital, blowing in the breathalyzer, and able to walk. It’s crazy what consuming massive quantities of alcohol can do to your tolerance.
That was actually 6 years ago today, haven’t had a drink since. I hope you can achieve something similar for yourself, it is possible :)
Even among binge-drinking college students, 10 drinks an hour is exceptional.
We used to play a game in college where you would drink 1 shot of beer per minute (so 90 oz of beer, or 7.5 cans of beer in an hour), and few people could make it past 30 minutes.
Power hours can definitely get you utterly trashed, but I think a big reason people would stop/slow down half way through those is that it's a bit physically uncomfortable. I don't think I could do a power hour with non-alcoholic beer right now if you paid me. I agree 10 drinks an hour is super rare though. Just saying if I absolutely had to do that for some reason I'd go with vodka not beer.
You're talking about a power hour. Pretty much everyone makes the hour. Nobody drops out after 30min unless they've been pregaming. Yes it gets you pretty drunk but many people continue drinking afterwards. The alcoholics do it with wine.
Pretty much everyone I hung out with in college were weekend only drinkers, not exactly the hard drinking crowd.
If people were regularly puking at the end it wouldn't be a popular game, just like if a 6-pack weren't a common amount to consume it wouldn't be a typical unit of sale.
I agree I didn't usually see people straight up drop out, but I've been around a couple power hours where I wasn't drinking (so more observant) and more than half the room was being really loose with the one shot per minute thing in the last 20-30 minutes. I'd say based on the number of bottles most people were actually consuming between 5 and 6 beers.
Could definitely depend on your group, but this seemed like a pretty typical frat to me.
I'm going by my own experiences. And I don't think I'm puritanical at all, but I am something of a lightweight with alcohol admittedly. I am male and I am a half-recovered alcoholic, for context.
Around 0.05 I'm tipsy to the point of it being obvious. Feeling good, effusive. And if I'm smart I'll stop drinking around here.
At 0.10 I'm flushed, joyous or melancholic, coordination is affected, I might slosh my drink on the table, and I'm going on and maybe making a bit of a fool of myself. I tend to want to go to bed shortly after. I won't have a bad hangover if I eat a good meal but yes, that's quite drunk in my opinion.
And at like 0.15+, I get very sedated. I tend to pass out and while it's not a stupor I am hard to rouse.
Above that is just passed out black-out drunk and I've only done that a few times thankfully, but I have, so I know that most of a bottle of 750 ml of 80 proof on an empty stomach is enough to potentially hospitalize me, and certainly leave me passed out in a puddle of vomit.
These numbers being for when I am alcohol naive. Not having drunk in months. If I have been drinking regularly you could easily double or triple the numbers. Most people do not have alcohol tolerance though, which is why I assumed an alcohol-naive drinker.
Part of it likely has to do with the fact that alcoholics' livers are often dysfunctional, so the .02% average wouldn't necessarily apply to the types of people who can reach 1% BAC.
I was always told that you eliminate roughly one drink per hour from your system. So it is possible that they did that feat over a longer time span. Staying up all night drinking then hopping in the car seems much more reasonable (at least for how to achieve that BAC, and not as a decision you should make in life).
He didn't start at 0% BAC, otherwise he would likely be experiencing delirium tremens.
Alcoholics tend to maintain a high BAC all the time, enough so that even after sleeping they still have enough alcohol in their blood to avoid delirium tremens.
So he probably drank much less than two hard liquor bottles.
Isn't this just a really complicated way of saying that Alcohol is a potassium diuretic and your body is adapting to something flushing your potassium all the time?
Not sure if it's lesser-known, though. When doing beer judging, we're told to load-up on foods with lots of fat and potassium to increase our tolerance (senses start working differently after you're toasted, can make judging tough)
Meanwhile...there is an argument somewhere about the stomach being the 2nd brain. I don't know how you can reasonably taste without swallowing wine (while understanding it's a far more reasonable way to go for the pros).
For some reason (presumably because I'm tall or because I have too much body fat (thanks Taco Bell!)), I have an extremely high tolerance to alcohol, despite the fact that I almost never drink. It can take upwards of 600ml of whisky for me to really "feel unsafe to drive" [1], which is part of the reason I don't really drink to begin with...If I don't have much fun with it, and it's not healthy for me, I don't really see the point in partaking.
[1] Don't worry, I've never tested this theory, I don't even own a car.
It sounds like BK channels interact with NMDA receptors, which are glutamate receptors. Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter. My understanding is that inhibiting glutamate is partly what makes alcohol relaxing (the other is it's interaction with GABA). Bodies have an amazing way of keeping themselves in equilibrium and when someone is introducing alcohol into their system on a regular basis, I figured that the body regulates this by increasing levels of glutamate (although maybe also via downregulating GABA receptors), so that the person stays awake even with higher doses of alcohol. I do think that this can lead to someone having a higher "tolerance". I also think that's what contributes to what some people call hangxiety, i.e. there's still extra glutamate floating around that wouldn't otherwise be there.
However, an enlarged liver helping someone process alcohol better sounds bizarre to me. I thought a liver being able to process alcohol faster was due to increased enzymes since the body again is trying to balance itself and is dealing with what is being introduced by upping certain enzymes, whereas in a non-drinker, those enzymes wouldn't be at elevated levels.
"However, an enlarged liver helping someone process alcohol better sounds bizarre to me. I thought a liver being able to process alcohol faster was due to increased enzymes since the body again is trying to balance itself and is dealing with what is being introduced by upping certain enzymes, whereas in a non-drinker, those enzymes wouldn't be at elevated levels."
You are correct, in fact an enlarged liver could be a sign that you are less able to metabolize alcohol. "To this effect, the adaptative increase in alcohol metabolism observed in chronic alcoholics disappears in patients with advanced liver disease." [1] Liver enlargement is a sign of liver disease. I guess that's the sort of mistake you will encounter when reading posts regarding biochemistry / medicine on hacker news.
"They can drink a lot of alcohol and still have a relatively low blood alcohol level."
Any sources for this? My understanding is that an enlarged liver does not process more alcohol because the enlargement is typically fatty deposits, cirrhosis, and inflammation. I did find an article that says alcoholic livers can produce a different set of enzymes to metabolize the alcohol. But it says it produces a different buzz, bit nothing about faster processing.
It's well known that alcoholics are for the most part better metabolizers of alcohol (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S166526811... Current concepts in alcohol metabolism, Caballeria), but its not at all related to liver enlargement. My understanding is that an enlarged liver is a symptom of alcoholic liver disease, not a physiologic adaptation to better metabolize alcohol. The current consensus is that most of the increased metabolism of alcohol comes from enzyme upregulation in the liver.
The authors misunderstanding of physiology makes me doubt any further conclusions he makes.
"Moreover, in human studies it has been found that alcohol consumption produces an increase in the ethanol elimination rate, specially at high concentrations, which is when the action of MEOS take place.37 This is important since it leads to a greater plasma concentration of acetaldehyde as well as an increase in toxic metabolites which may cause liver damage."
Ah, this is the thing I was mentioning earlier, but my other source didn't say that it increased the elimination rate.
The author seems confused about how BK channels relate to tolerance, here he notes that decreased BK channels lead to increased tolerance: "Exposure to alcohol upregulates microRNA (mir-9), which in turn modifies BK mRNA, selectively destabilizing certain types of BK mRNA."
Then later he seems to be stating that decreased BK channels would lead to decreased tolerance: "The consequence of this would then be that the development of alcohol tolerance could be slowed or halted by preventing the modification of BK channels, like by using RNAi to degrade certain types of BK mRNA."
Perhaps he meant "by using RNAi to degrade mir-9". Ignoring the above issues, it seems very hand wavy to say "let's just get this RNA interfering drug into your brain and target this specific BK RNA".
The author referenced a paper from 2009 about the microRNAs and BK subunits: "Post-transcriptional regulation of BK channel splice variant stability by miR-9 underlies neuroadaptation to alcohol" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2714263/
"Tolerance represents a critical component of addiction. The large conductance calcium-and voltage-activated potassium channel (BK) is a well-established alcohol target, and an important element in behavioral and molecular alcohol tolerance. We tested whether microRNA, a newly-discovered class of gene expression regulators, plays a role in the development of tolerance. We show that in adult mammalian brain alcohol upregulates microRNA (miR-9) and mediates post-transcriptional reorganization in BK mRNA splice variants by miR-9-dependent destabilization of BK mRNAs containing 3’UTRs with a miR-9 Recognition Element (MRE). Different splice variants encode BK isoforms with different alcohol sensitivities. Computational modeling indicates that this miR-9 dependent mechanism contributes to alcohol tolerance. Moreover, this mechanism can be extended to regulation of additional miR-9 targets relevant to alcohol abuse. Our results describe a novel mechanism of multiplex regulation of stability of alternatively spliced mRNA by miRNA in drug adaptation and neuronal plasticity."
but I very rarely get a hangover (yes this does encourage/ allow school night drinking - inc now)
I have to drink either red wine or over 8 (uk - 568ml) pints of 5%abv lager to start to get fraction of a hangover the next day (starting at a slight thick head level)
incedently for me, eating stuff with sugar and alchol = major acid reflux this took ages to figure out why sometime I was throwing up in the middle of the night (no other symtoms)
another thing that is fairly obivious to me now is how proportional the effect is of the amount of food eaten before drinking and the speed of which you get drunk. This can be used to great effect for big drinking days (eg stag do)
I could easily drink all day comsuming > 15 (uk - 568ml, 5% abv) pints if I keep a level of food in my stomache
I am guessing you are less than 30 years old?
give it 5-10 years and it'll be much more painful after a heavy night of drinking.
sugar and alcohol are both metabolized by the liver, and large amounts of both/either will make you feel poorly. age and frequent use of alcohol and junk food will just wear your body out sooner.
the feeling of being drunk is most noticeable when your blood alcohol content is rising, aka when you drink quickly on an empty stomach. but you can have a nice buzz going all day with proper planning and eating beforehand.
I realize after typing this out it sounds a bit preachy, but take it as a caution from someone who felt invincible in their 20s
I was reading the article to learn what I can do to increase my alcohol tolerance. I was never much of a drinker, but at some point it started dropping really radically - to where I now have a massive hangover if I have a large glass of wine in a restaurant (a restaurant pour vs. my own) - even over an hour, with water and food, etc.
I do sometimes wish I could have two glasses, or try more wine when on a trip, or have a digestif in a great restaurant...but but nope, it's out entirely.
Asked my doctor, she said, coldly: "uhm, why drink if it makes you feel bad?"
My understanding was that increased alcohol intake raises hormone levels, especially cortisol, which raises blood pressure/breathing/etc and keeps you from dying. Also note the jitters experienced as the alcohol is metabolized and things swing out of balance in the opposite direction.
So it would just be a matter of training your adrenals to recognize and react quickly to the incoming booze, which for some people is almost like a violent allergic reaction to a bee sting, causing them to drink heavily in order to calm down. I don't really have any research to back this part up though.
I definitely fall into the latter category, that is I have very little tolerence for alchohol.
There are people I have known who can drink huge amounts and still be functional, these people drink steadily and regularly.
I gave up completely about two years ago and I strongly recommend this.
I was never a big drinker but stopping has had a dramatic effect on my weight and health.
It is not that difficult to stop and has dramatic benefits.
I have noticed that with some intentional concentration, I can summon a higher degree of sobriety/functionality than I might ordinarily have when under the influence. I always assumed much of that was from the adrenal glands though.
Yes, but also no. Through practice alone you do get better at activities while drunk, like walking or driving, but I can assure you that what two drinks did to me when I never drank vs what they do now is entirely different. My rationality stays the same now. Note that the high alcohol content will catch up to you later (you’re still dehydrated), but in the moment alcoholics are an entirely different breed a couple drinks in. If you ever hang out with people who drink regularly and those who don’t, you’ll quickly see the difference.
That's an ungenerous remark, and un-called for. If there are measures in the article, then please post them. Otherwise lighten up, and cease the ad-hominem attacks.
I don't know, man. I have a friend who drinks so much it's ludicrous, and is perfectly present and functional. he is a sailor, and I have avoided situations where I see he is getting plastered (because he can get plastered, too!) and the only competent sailor on board. But he is highly functioning when drunk, I can attest to that!
Obviously there are lots of variables based on your size and individual physiology, but on average, each drink raises your BAC somewhere around .02%.
So, even without accounting for an enlarged liver that processed alcohol more quickly, that driver with a 1% BAC in South Africa must have had around 50 drinks in quick succession, then gotten behind the wheel.
Even if you were drinking liquor, that's basically downing two bottles of whisky in under an hour.
Plenty to kill the average person, but apparently not enough to keep this driver from getting behind the wheel.
Wild.