What Alcohol Actually Does to Your Brain and Body

Lifehacker.com

Alcohol like caffeine, has an enormous reputation but loose understanding in popular culture.

Everyone, it seems, takes their cues on how alcohol affects the mind and body from an eclectic mix of knowledge: personal experience, pop culture, tall tales of long nights, the latest studies to make the health news wires and second hand tips.You might have gathered that alcohol is a depressant, that it’s dehydrating, that you can drink about one drink an hour and stay relatively sober. Some of that is true. But much of it depends on a large number of factors.

Taken from “Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alchol and Caffeine”.

Your body sees alcohol as a poison  or at least as something it doesn’t actually want inside it. To fight back and sober you up, humans have evolved to produce Alcohol Dehydrogenase.

That enzyme gets its shot at your alcohol when it attempts to pass through the stomach lining and when it reaches your liver, primarily.  On contact, it snatches a hydrogen atom off the ethanol molecules in your drink, rendering it into intoxicating acetaldehyde.

Human can then use aldehyde dehydrogenase as a kind of clean up crew, breaking down the aldehyde that’s sometimes considered a cause of hangovers, along with dehydration.

It’s a fight between how much you can drink, versus how fast your enzymes can bust down your indulgences and their by products. But many factors affect certain people’s production of the two alcohol- crushing compounds.

Alcohol Dehydrogenase: more effective in men than in women. Young men, in fact, may have up to 70 to 80 percent greater enzyme activity in the presence of alcohol. But men’s AD effectiveness also drops off with age at a faster rate than in women, such that , by around 55 or 60 , men may find themselves able to handle less alcohol than their female counterparts.

Full stomach:helps break down alcohol, but not because your food “soaks up” the alcohol. When you eat a big mean, your stomach’s pyloric sphincter, a kind of release valve into the small intestine, closes tightly. Your body knows that you’ve got food that should get a good going over in your stomach before it heads straight to the high absorption small intestine, so it keep it there and the AD in your stomach has more time to work on the alcohol.

Drink on an empty stomach and the liquid quickly makes it into the small intestine, where there’s more than 200 square meters of surface area for absorption into your body.

Genetics: Your great-great-grandparents have a say in how buzzed your Friday night gets, for sure, but for roughly on third to half of Asian drinkers, it’s more than a slight variance. Alcohol flush reaction, a flushing of the face when drinking, occurs because the enzyme “clean-up-crew”, AD is mutated by just one amino acid. That changes how effective its molecules are in bonding with and busting up, acetaldehyde. With excess acetaldehyde in their system, those with a flush reaction get red-faced and can experience heart palpitations, dizziness & severe nausea in extreme cases.

Aspirin: Don’t take aspirin before drinking. Aspirin seriously cuts the effectiveness of your bod’s AD enzymes. In one  1990 study, the average blood alcohol levels of those who took two maximum strength aspirin tablets before drinking were an average of 26 percent higher than those who were aspirin free. Other studies have suggested even more impact on your body’s ability to break down alcohol. That also means more acetaldehyde in your system down the line, so you will learn your lesson quickly if you are considering aspirin as a helper.

Absorption and Elimination Is a Curve, Not a Straight Line: Your Blood Alcohol Calculator moves through plateaus, responds differently to drinks higher than 20- 25 percent alcohol by volume and eliminates some alcohol in pure form- which is how police can measure it on your breath.

It Extends Your Life—Kind Of: Alcoholism:Clinical and Experimental Research, researchers followed 1824 people over a total of 20 years, as they aged between 55 and 65. Of those who abstained entirely, 69 percent died. Among those who drank in “moderate” amounts, 41 percent died- which was 23 percent less than the “light” drinkers. Even “heavy drinkers” fared better than abstainers, with just 61 percent passing away during the study period.

Popular theories center on the antioxidants and reservatrol compounds found in wines or on the studies showing alcohol as increasing levels of HDL(“good”) cholesterol.

It Doesn’t “Kill” Brain Cells, but Does Inhibit Them: It’s true that a high concentrations, like the nearly 100% pure alcohol used in sterilizing solutions, alcohol can indeed kill cells and neurons. But given that the blood reaching your brain is only at 0.08% percent alcohol if you are legally intoxicated.

What alcohol can and does do to your brain is affect the way your neurons get their firing triggers from glutamate.It infiltrates the glutamate receptors in your synapses, hurting their ability to send off their normal “fire” messages. Alcohol has this impact all  across your brain- the parts that control muscles, speech, coordination, judgment and so on.

That’s Also Why it, Uh, “Inhibits” Sex: The studies and implications are numerous, to say the least, but if you want a thumbnail understanding of how alcohol, as Shakespeare put it, “provokes the desire, but.. takes away the performance,” it has to do with the firing of nerves , in the brain and elsewhere, that would relax the arteries enough to get both parties moving. It’s a bit more complex than that and drinking in moderation can be a net benefit in some cases, but alcohol, paradoxically, doesn’t help one specific region of your self to “relax”.

Alcohol is Particularly Effective at Inhibiting Memories: N-Methyl-D-aspartic acid or NMDA, the receptor for which alcohol seems particularly  adept at interfering with, studies have shown that while subjects under alcohol’s influence can recall existing memories, events happening during inebriation are regularly hard to remember. It varies with the amount consumed and seems to top out at a serious 0.2% blood alcohol content.

It Makes Other People Seems More “Intentional” :If you’d never been raised to think things through, you’d assume that most actions people took were fairly intentional and possibly pointed at causing you harm.

It’s a Terrible Sleep Aid:Ever heard the term “nightcap?” People have long believed that alcohol helps you get to sleep and that part can be true, for some. Once you’re asleep, though, alcohol’s interaction with your brain can lead to some fitful sleep and no sleep at all, especially if you consumed caffeine anytime close to hitting the pillow. Caffeine, take up to 5 Hours to break down half a dose.