A fresher take on the science of alcohol
The Scientific Briefing with Luke Boulter
Welcome to the University of York! A phrase which by now you will no doubt be familiar with and more than likely a little tired of hearing. First I must ask you to calm down; breathe deeply and continue to read. I do appreciate that as a fresher you have perhaps just looked at the front page of Vision, realised that it is poorly laid out and has content to rival an NHS finance leaflet, and sworn never to approach campus news again. That is why this column is dedicated to the science of being a fresher: why you will inevitably wake up feeling a bit groggy and why alcohol affects you so much. I will also attempt to answer the ultimate question: can you live on beer?
So what does alcohol do to you? Well, you have fought your way to the bar and you have your tall, glistening pint. The main alcohol in drinks is known as ethanol. As you drink, the alcohol is absorbed in your stomach: about 20% of total alcohol absorption occurs here, the other 80% is absorbed in the small intestine. From this point the alcohol is dissolved in the blood and carried into the tissues. All tissues are affected, from your muscles to your brain. The only exempt tissue is fat, so it is a myth that fatter people have a higher alcohol tolerance; it’s more likely due to the increase in muscle required to move larger people. Blood alcohol levels increase significantly within 20 minutes. At this point the tissues become progressively more saturated and the ‘tipsy’ feeling kicks in. Obviously, lots of factors affect the rate of alcohol absorption: whether you have eaten; concentration of alcohol and whether the drink is carbonated.
There are actually defined physiological states which alcohol induces: with a Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) of less than 0.12% you are in the phase known as euphoria; the following stages are excitement, confusion, stupor, coma and death, the latter occurring if the BAC level hits more than 50% of total blood volume.
So you’ve been out drinking. You’ve managed to get home, asked the porter for your forgotten door code, and collapsed semi-clothed on your bed. Wishing the room would stop moving, you fall asleep. Your body works tirelessly through the night and most of the morning removing the alcohol from your body, at approximately 1 unit per hour. When you wake up you are more than likely to have removed most of the alcohol from your body, but you feel awful. Two factors are involved in the great student hangover. The first is dehydration: alcohol inhibits anti-diuretic hormone, so your kidneys don’t reabsorb as much water as they filter through your blood, thus you have a full bladder and very low blood water level. Also, the drinks we have don’t just contain alcohol and water; they contain other compounds known as congeners. These can give flavour, but also give a wretched hangover as they are toxins and effectively poison the body. There are more of these in less purified beverages such as red wine and bourbons; drinking white wine and vodka-mixers is generally better, and research has shown that 33% of people who drank ‘dark’ drinks were hungover compared to only 3% of people who stuck to ‘white’ drinks.
So what can be done to help with these self inflicted student maladies? Hair of the Dog, despite being popular, doesn’t work; it puts off the inevitable, and puts more pressure on the liver to remove toxins, making the final hangover worse. Coffee and burnt toast may help; the carbon found on burnt toast could act in a similar way to activated charcoal used to filter poisons through the body. Coffee is a stimulant, but also a diuretic, so perhaps not the best thing to rehydrate your body with.
The best cure seems to be bananas and eggs. Bananas contain a lot of potassium, a crucial neural electrolyte lost during dehydration, so bananas can alleviate the headache commonly found with a hangover. Eggs contain cysteine which breaks down the hangover-causing toxin acetaldehyde. Fruit juice though seems to be the friend of the student; it contains fructose to give you an energy boost and has been shown to speed up the loss of toxins. It also contains vitamins to replace those which were lost when drinking.
If you fancy something a bit special and don’t think fruit juice is for you, Ergopharma have come up with the ‘beer neutralizer,’ which its creators claim can remove congeners – so no hangovers! It also prevents the break-down of starches and complex carbohydrates, eliminating the worry of those beer belly-producing carbs!
As for the ultimate question (to which I hope to give an answer more useful than 42): can you live on beer? This question was posed to the best of the best when New Scientist published it in its ‘Last Word’ section. One contributor showed that one pint alone can offer more than 5% RDA of vitamins B2, B6 and B9. However, essential vitamins such as vitamins D, C and A are lacking. Truth be told no one really knows; it’s too unethical an experiment (although I know at least a few of you would disagree). The closest anyone has come was during the 1756-63 seven years war. The physician to the British Naval Fleet took three crews on three ships, each of which had a spirits allowance. He gave one ship, the Grampus, large amounts of beer as well as the spirits allowance. The Daedalus and the Tortoise were just allowed spirits; at the end of the war the spirit based ships had 112 and 62 men needing hospitalisation respectively, the Grampus however only needed 13.
I’m not sure what this says for early medical research, but it’s bottoms up to beer, the most medicinal drink of all!
