YOU rush to the bar after a long day’s work, planning to down a beer with
your pals to unwind. Or maybe you’re celebrating a promotion with a bottle of
bubbly, or drowning your sorrows with a glass of whisky, or ordering some
tequila shots with your crazy old college buddy. Then again, perhaps you want to
mellow out with a good book and a glass of brandy, or go for a romantic dinner
with your lover and a fine Merlot.
The idea that what you drink dictates your mood is firmly implanted in most
drinkers’ minds. And there is a ready explanation to hand: different brews have
different strengths and their own characteristic mix of trace compounds, and it
seems only reasonable that these factors could affect how you feel. But some
scientists think we are fooling ourselves: we might as well be drinking pure
ethanol diluted with water.
To understand how particular drinks might pack different kinds of punch, it
helps to know how the body processes alcohol—or ethanol, to be precise.
After you take a drink, the liquid’s first stop is in the stomach. As it sloshes
around, some alcohol gets broken down and a small amount passes through the
stomach wall and into the bloodstream. Then a ring-shaped muscle called the
pyloric valve opens up at the bottom of the stomach and your drink drops into
the small intestine, which has a much greater surface area than the stomach and
so allows alcohol to be absorbed far more rapidly.
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At this point you’re beginning to feel pretty fine as the alcohol work its
magic on your brain. But your liver is already chugging along trying to rid your
blood of the poisonous alcohol that’s pouring in through the intestinal wall.
The liver processes about 15 millilitres of ethanol per hour, roughly the amount
in a small glass of wine. How drunk you eventually feel depends on a race
between absorption and breakdown: if absorption were instant, you’d feel the
full effect of each drink, but in practice the liver will already have cleared
some alcohol from your body by the time it is all absorbed.
Some nutrients, including fructose, can speed up the breakdown of alcohol in
the liver (Alcohol and Alcoholism, vol 26, p 53). But experts scoff at
the idea that adding cranberry juice to your vodka, for example, makes for a
gentler buzz. “You’d have to eat enormous amounts of fructose. It’d give you a
stomachache,” says Wayne Jones of the National Laboratory of Forensic Toxicology
in Linköping, Sweden.
The liver clears alcohol at a nearly constant rate, so how intoxicated you
become depends mostly on how fast the alcohol is absorbed. If the stomach
retains alcohol for a long time, its concentration in the blood will rise
relatively slowly. But if your drink passes straight through into the small
intestine, blood alcohol levels rise rapidly, leading to a correspondingly
sudden and powerful intoxication.
Sugars and fats tend to keep the pyloric valve closed longer while the
stomach digests them. So drinks that are creamy or sugary will creep up on you
more slowly—hence the time-honoured idea that a glass of milk will line
your stomach. “People don’t drink milk and alcohol to get high,” observes Robert
Swift, a psychiatrist and pharmacologist at Brown University in Providence,
Rhode Island. A high-fat meal consumed with a bottle of wine will keep the
pyloric valve shut for hours while the stomach digests the food.
The strength of a drink can also influence how alcohol gets absorbed, but in
rather complicated ways. Generally speaking, weaker drinks are absorbed more
slowly. Yet downing a shot of whisky on an empty stomach won’t necessarily give
you a quick high. In some people, strong drinks irritate the pyloric valve, so
it clamps shut and keeps the alcohol in the stomach where absorption is
slower.
The effects of alcoholic strength get even more complicated when food is
involved. In 1993, Charles Lieber and his colleagues at Bronx Veterans Affairs
Medical Center, New York, compared the effects of drinking whisky and beer (
Alcoholism—Clinical and Experimental Research, vol 17, p 709). In men
with empty stomachs, whisky raised blood-alcohol levels more quickly than beer.
But strangely, the effect was reversed in the men who had eaten first. Because
food keeps alcohol in the stomach longer, Lieber thinks this could be explained
if the alcohol-metabolising enzyme in the stomach works more effectively on
concentrated alcohol.
The bottom line is that “absorption is really, really unpredictable”, says
Jones. “You never really know how the stomach is going to react.” With so many
variables involved, any attempt to control the quality of your alcohol buzz by
picking a drink with certain absorption characteristics looks futile.
But of course, ethanol isn’t the only substance entering the bloodstream.
Fermenters and distillers use a huge range of techniques and ingredients to make
alcoholic drinks, creating a corresponding variety of chemicals. Some only
affect taste and appearance; others could, in principle, change the type of
intoxication that you experience.
For example, most drinks also contain traces of alcohols other than ethanol.
“Each has an intoxicating effect, a slightly different one, actually,” says Sean
O’Connor, an alcohol metabolism expert at Indiana University. He notes that the
neural toxicities are different, indicating that the alcohols have different
effects on the brain.
The most common alternative alcohol is methanol, the wood alcohol found in
antifreeze and paint thinners. But it is also dangerous. People have gone blind
or died from drinking methanol, either knowingly or in illicit liquor made
cheaply by substituting this alcohol for ethanol.
Even some fruit-based alcoholic drinks such as red wine or plum brandy can
contain up to 2 per cent methanol. But Jones thinks you won’t notice any
difference in the kind of drunkenness produced by these drinks—any
additional intoxication from methanol is likely to be masked by the larger
quantities of ethanol. You might wake up the next morning feeling awful, though.
The liver breaks down methanol into toxic compounds that Jones believes are
responsible for the worst hangover symptoms
(see “Desperate remedies”). To
avoid this, you could try drinking a purer drink such as vodka, which contains
virtually no methanol.
As well as a range of alcohols, drinks normally contain myriad substances of
various types and origins—including spices and herbs that may have been
part of the brew. “Particularly in brandies and whiskies, there are all sorts of
strange compounds, the effects of which aren’t really known,” says Swift.
Among the drinks that purportedly contain chemicals that give them an extra
kick, absinthe is perhaps the most infamous. The “green fairy” enjoyed by Ernest
Hemingway, Oscar Wilde and Vincent van Gogh developed such a reputation for
making people delirious and giving them convulsions that most European countries
banned it early in the 1900s.
This electric-green spirit does indeed contain a hallucinogen called thujone,
which comes from a herb, wormwood, that is used to flavour the drink. But it is
doubtful whether absinthe contains enough thujone to have a noticeable effect.
“Unfortunately, not much research has been done and nobody really knows,” says
Tom Hodgkinson, a partner in the London-based company Green Bohemia that
recently started importing absinthe to the United Kingdom from the Czech
Republic.
Green Bohemia’s absinthe has thujone levels of less than 10 parts per
million, as required by European Union regulations on food additives. As it is
70 per cent alcohol, Hodgkinson doubts whether anyone could drink enough for the
thujone to make them hallucinate. “You’d have to drink so much that you’d die
first. There’s no evidence that the levels of thujone in the original absinthe
had any effect either.”
So could other psychoactive spices such as nutmeg, which also go into
absinthe, be responsible for any special qualities? Most scientists doubt it.
Indeed, they are sceptical in general that the poison you pick determines your
mood. Any apparent effects are probably due to self-fulfilling expectations. If
you think drinking whisky makes you violent, you’ll be more likely to throw a
punch; if you think gin makes you depressed, you’ll get a little weepy after a
few gin and tonics. “Everyone develops a favourite way to fool themselves that
they’re in control of losing control,” remarks O’Connor.
Many people think champagne bubbles “go to their head” and make them giggly,
for example. But champagne is a special-occasion drink, so it’s likely that
people are already happy before they quaff it. “I think it’s a strong
psychological effect with champagne,” says Jones, though he admits that the
carbon dioxide in the bubbles may affect gastric emptying in some unknown
way.
Not much research has been done on this, or on the matter of whether trace
compounds have an effect. Then there’s the question not of which drink, or how
much, but how it’s served. Some people firmly believe, for example, that you get
drunk quicker if you suck your tipple through a straw
(see Last Word).
It’s not hard to see why there have been few experiments in real-life
situations. Given the number of variables that come into play, a real drinking
session isn’t likely to be reproducible. “If you did the same thing tomorrow,
same bar, same clothes, same friends,” says O’Connor, “you’d have a different
DzԲ.”
Nevertheless, the experts are pretty much agreed that it’s the drinkers’
expectations and their alcohol absorption rate that matter, not the label on the
bottle. “A screwdriver versus a glass of wine versus a beer really doesn’t make
that much difference,” says O’Connor.
So I’ll have what you’re having.
MENTION drug-related crime and people think immediately about heroin and
cocaine. But 250 years ago, it was a different matter entirely.
“A new kind of drunkenness, unknown to our ancestors is lately sprung up
amongst us, and which, if not put a stop to, will infallibly destroy a great
part of the inferior people,” wrote the London magistrate and novelist Henry
Fielding in An Inquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers.
“The drunkenness I here intend is that acquired by the strongest intoxicating
liquors, and particularly by that poison called Gin; which I have great reason
to think is the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than a
hundred thousand people in this metropolis.”
Gin had arrived from what is today the Netherlands with the troops of William
of Orange, Britain’s king from 1689. Distilled from grain, it was originally
known as genever, from the Old Dutch for juniper—the berry that gives the
spirit its flavour. And though invented by a Dutch physician as a diuretic, the
soldiers found it also gave them “Dutch courage”.
At the time, the British still mostly drank ale and when they did drink
spirits, they chose brandy. But France was out of favour, fighting yet another
war with Britain, and anti-French policies ushered in by King William gave
genever—or gin as it became known—a market opportunity.
Parliament encouraged the distillation of spirits from English grain and soon
vast numbers of people set up their own distilleries. Gin drinking became
positively patriotic, with workers being given gin as part of their wages. Soon
it became the nation’s favourite tipple.
But it also became a curse. Women were particularly taken with the spirit and
bought it from pharmacists for “medicinal purposes”, mixing it with warm water
to calm the nerves—hence the name “mother’s ruin”. Mass drunkenness became
a serious problem. By the 1740s, the British were consuming some 8 million
gallons (30 million litres) a year and estimates suggest that in parts of London
a quarter of the houses were gin shops.
The cartoonist William Hogarth drew his famous images of Gin Lane (above)
with every building falling down except the pawnbroker and the gin house. He
contrasted this with the relative harmony of Beer Street (left). Hogarth’s
friend, Fielding, blamed gin for a rising crime rate: “However cheap this vile
potion may be, the poorer sort will not easily be able to supply themselves with
the quantities they desire; for the intoxicating draught itself disqualifies
them from using any honest means to acquire it, at the same time that it removes
all sense of fear and shame, and emboldens them to commit every wicked and
desperate enterprise.”
Something had to be done. In 1751, Parliament increased the tax on gin, and
its sale was strictly controlled. By contrast, government allowed anyone who
could afford a relatively inexpensive licence to sell beer and virtually
overnight pubs appeared in almost every alley. Beer began to regain at least
some of its former popularity.
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Further reading:
Absinthe: History in a Bottle by Barnaby Conrad (Chronicle Books, 1997) - Vincent van Gogh: Chemicals, crises, and creativity by Wilf Arnold (Birkhauser, 1992)
