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Alcohol
Manage episode 151599924 series 1033010
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Here’s a summary of Scientifically Speaking’s first episode! All the facts about alcohol that people could want to know!
Alcohol is a depressant, which means it has effects on the brain that cause you to process things more slowly. Your reaction time is lowered, your inhibitions are lowered, and your judgment is off. Your sexual drive goes up, but due to alcohol’s blood thinning effect, your…um…prowess is diminished.
The reason these symptoms of intoxication occur is because alcohol essentially blocks neurotransmitters from binding, meaning your brain can’t process info as efficiently.
Alcohol breakdown depends on how much of a certain enzyme you have. Alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) breaks down alcohol, and so more ADH means more breakdown. Men have higher ADH concentrations than women, and certain ethnic groups have reduced tolerance to alcohol.
There is no difference between different types of alcohol in terms of what actually gets you drunk. It’s all ethanol, but different drinks have different concentrations of ethanol. Liquor has a higher concentration than beer, for example. However, due to the way alcohol is produced, toxic byproducts such as acetaldehyde or tannins will have higher concentrations in some alcohols than in others. Darker liquors such as rum or whiskey will cause you to have a worse hangover than vodka or gin!
But this all depends on context. Your body prepares ADH if it suspects that alcohol will soon be poured. If you drink a certain way because of other factors (such as day drinking for Slope Day), your body is unprepared to digest the alcohol and as a result you’ll end up drunker than you expect! This may give you the idea that some alcohols make you a different type of drunk, but this myth is unsupported by evidence. It’s more likely that you’re used to drinking certain kinds of alcohol in certain contexts, and changing that results in a different feeling. It has nothing to do with the chemicals in the alcohol itself!
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