Just a warning to everyone: This effect doesn't seem to have much scientific support beyond the cited paper. Other work has followed up and was not able to replicate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8603706/.
Great suggestion. There is also Kislip, which seems to be based on probiotics and, like DHM, also helps metabolize acetaldehyde. Acetium (a Finnish product) also claims to lower acetaldehyde, but that might be a localized effect (mouth/nasopharynx + GI tract).
What we really need is something that helps quickly break down acetaldehyde, which is what alcohol is broken down to in your bloodstream and is responsible for all the negative side effects.
Check out a product named ZBiotics [1] which claims to do this. I can't tell you that it for certain works as advertised, but between myself and several other people now in my friend group, all but one swears by the results in terms of the morning after.
Agreed, not seeing many good use cases. It could be prescribed to alcoholics who can’t/won’t stop drinking to help them taper off alcohol, but people would just end up drinking more to counter it.
The best use I can think of is for undercover agents to drink heavily and avoid intoxication!
As long as it doesn't leave your palet with a taste of the gel, the point is to enjoy the taste of these drinks without the effects of alcohol. Not everybody drink alcohol for the alteration effects and the non-alcohol versions of most beverages is so shitty you don't really want them.
My mother for example hate the feeling of being intoxicated, even a little. So she only drink one glass on occasions and barely finishes it. She would definitely enjoy it more if she could have different wines over the course of a meal. It would also be useful if you want to enjoy the taste of some drinks with alcohol but you need to drive or you are in an on-call schedule.
Turmeric-based drinks we can find here in Japan are said to work miracles against hangover. I rarely drink alcohol, so I can't tell whether that's true.
Unlikely. The alleged medical benefits of turmeric are largely illusory; the only medically interesting property that it's been conclusively shown to have is that it interferes with a wide range of biochemical assays.
> Something to sober you up if you're already drunk would be amazing ...
But it's the fun of alcohol!
What'd be amazing would be something that really works against the headaches and/or prevent vomiting. Basically something for the next day or even the next two days (when you get old, if you party too hard it can take two days to feel good again: I hate it so at 50 I very rarely party hard anymore: maybe once a year).
Hangovers are a good part caused by by the body reacting to the "damage" that alcohol does:
- Alcohol loosens the blood vessels, whereas a lot of the effects of a hangover are caused by the body then "over-constricting" when the aclohol goes away, causing headaches and nausea. The cause of the headache is similar for a brain-freeze from too much ice cream causing the veins in your neck and throat to constrict, though the brain-freeze goes away as you warm back up.
- There's also the dehydration as alcohol throws off the balance of water in your system as it makes you want to pee more, but interferes with the body's ability to actually absorb water.
- Alcohol causes your body to pump out more "feel good" hormones, which then lead to a crash later.
So the way to prevent a hangover is to not get drunk in the first place, same as always. If you want to drink and limit the effects of alcohol (including the initial "benefits") then this has potential. It may prevent vomiting in the sense that vomiting is your body trying to eject the poison as it's building up faster than it can process it (eg when you're already trashed an on the train to hangoverville).
However, people often tend to drink for the "good" effects that this gel prevents. If what you want is alcohol's fun, then you're going to need another cure (essentially an IV drip, and drugs to replace the hormones and loosen your blood vessels - all of which are not readily available for other good reasons).
I have really awful genetics for drinking(I'm 23 and already experience the thing you're describing with taking multiple days to feel good again, and instead of physical symptoms I get crushing depression) so I'd love to just take some of this stuff before a night out to drink the same volume as other people without having to deal with the aftereffects.
Naltrexone is a good alternative to this that doesn't make you physically sick. It just dulls the effect to the point where you kinda just get bored of drinking.
I can’t stand the taste of any alcohol. I literally only consume it for one reason. The intoxicating effect. I get enough to get the job done then stop.
So this gel seems like drinking less booze with extra steps. I do see a use for women and undercover cops though. Or to make people think you are drunker than you are.
They already noted in the article that once it’s passed into your bloodstream this approach is useless. I see it more like being a better form of naltrexone, someone takes it before going on a night out and saves themselves a nasty hangover while getting to party. I’ve always disliked the lack of availability of low alcohol beers in the States (1-2%) and this could be a decent solution for that. As is the easiest thing to do for moderation when going out in the States for me is to do the One On One Off where you alternate between one moderate alcohol drink and one NA drink. It would be more ideal to just pop a pill right before I go out that lets me tailor the level of absorption exactly as I want it.
I was unaware of people using naltrexone for hangover prevention and did a bit of spot research, it seems naltrexone only prevents the buzz/euphoria from alcohol consumption but doesn't prevent impairment or hangover symptoms, such as those caused by dehydration, nor does it prevent liver damage.
> someone takes it before going on a night out and saves themselves a nasty hangover while getting to party
But if their way of partying is to get drunk, this gel will prevent them from partying, since getting drunk requires the alcohol to get into your bloodstream.
I wonder how that would affect the calories of the alcohol. Apparently the ethanol gets broken down into acetic acid, which I believe can't be digested further? Does that mean you also wouldn't gain weight when drinking dry beer or wine?
EDIT: Apparently acetic acid _does_ have calories. Didn't know that.
> Apparently acetic acid _does_ have calories. Didn't know that.
Calories are measured by burning the substance. While it very precisely determines contained energy in the physics sense, it's a question whether all that energy is used by digestion? Especially if it's something the body treats as a toxin and wants to remove as soon as possible?
A bit pedantic but burning is a chemical reaction, and redox reactions are redox reactions no matter where they're happening.
Also, substances like ethanol and acetic acid are not digested, they pretty much just go straight into the bloodstream. There is a limit on how much e.g. ethanol the liver can process per hour, which does put a cap on how many of ethanol's calories are released as ATP + body heat. Acetic acid is a normal temporary metabolite though and so its consumption is much more complete (it gets used by cells all over).
From this article[0] it seems ~60% of the calories in lager come from the alcohol - presumably ~40% come from carbohydrates. And from Google, acetic acid is 349 kcal / 100g, versus pure ethanol at 700 kcal / 100g. So if this approach converted 100% of alcohol to acetic acid, you'd drop the calories from lager by ~30% overall. To your question, dry wine or lower-carb beer would be proportionally even better.
The flip-side of this is perhaps consumption of too much acetic acid! It's impossible to calculate potential toxicity without understanding the strength of the acetic acid generated, though.
> And from Google, acetic acid is 349 kcal / 100g, versus pure ethanol at 700 kcal / 100g.
Metabolism matters. Gasoline is over 800kcal/100g, but you wouldn't get that much from it (if anything at all).
Alcohol has a particularly long metabolic pathway, which after ingesting approximately 20-30g gets cut short to one where acetic acid is excreted (commonly known as "breaking the seal") and the overall upper energy yield limit becomes approximately 110kcal/100g.
Executive summary is that on a given session it's the first two 12oz (330ml) beers which provide most of the calories from alcohol and their contribution is on par with a snickers bar.
Anything you can do with a magic chemical you can do with preparation. Here’s a mind-blowing option. Stop drinking and then you don’t have to deal with:
The fact that it’s killing you.
The fact that you might kill somebody else while driving.
The latest science says the safe number of drinks might be one. Per week. If you’re not keeping it to that you’re harming your health. (And if you’re keeping it to one per week there’s no need to break it down in the body) just keep it out of there to begin with.
Jim Koch, founder and brewer of Sam Adams, says that he mixes a teaspoon of bakers yeast (not sure which) and yogurt to break down the alcohol before it hits the bloodstream and has been doing it for years if not decades.
One guy says it works. The rest of the article is about a small experiment that showed otherwise. Then it quotes experts who explain why it doesn't work and called it an urban legend.
I heard a different variant of this, which is that Jim Koch the brewer at Sam Adams is a functioning alcoholic who drinks a lot throughout the day. The yogurt and yeast is an unrelated thing that he claims to work.
> "Yeast can degrade ethanol," says microbiologist Benjamin Tu of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. "But they love other sugars — glucose, maltose — more. When those sugars are around, the cells turn off the genes needed for alcohol degradation."
Hypothetically, if the yeast could work fast enough(I'm 99% sure it can't unless he's leaving the mixture in a sealed container for a few months before drinking it) wouldn't this result in straight vinegar
I've always been slightly surprised that there have been no breakthroughs on ways to sober up, and especially on ways to feel less of the effects the next day. Yes it would be a worthy thing for society, but also, whoever achieves it would make vast amounts of money.
If you're an alcoholic, and your body is physically dependent on alcohol consumption, would this allow you to satisfy your physical cravings without the deleterious effects normally associated with alcohol addiction? Kind of like how a nicotine patch helps satisfy the physical addiction?
That's exactly what benzodiazepines are for, but only for short-term taper protocols as the dependence/withdrawal profile over the long term is worse than alcohol. Medium-term can be covered by gabapentin.
I know an alcoholic who was also addicted to gabapentin. It didn't reduce his alcoholism, and even when he tried to stop drinking, he would get stoned on the gabapentin (and was largely unaware of his diminished state)
>> breaks down alcohol in the gastrointestinal tract without harming the body.
Likely no. This stuff will destroy the alcohol before it enters the bloodstream. So it sounds useful to stop people absorbing more alcohol (pumping the stomach situations) but won't do much for alcohol already in the blood and causing effects in the body.
Woudn't people just consume more alcohol to compensate the one destroyed by this invention? My guess is that some persons drink until they are drunk, not until they took N glasses of drinks.
what for? sugar is already broken down in your body into glucose to be absorbed. there are already enzymes you can take to help break it down faster, but it's all going to be absorbed regardless.
perhaps what you really want is something to block glucose absorption?
You could invent resistant bacteria that eats all the sugar in your stomach. There are already such but they are lethal if you don't do much about them, but maybe it is possible to make nice versions of them that just eats sugar and don't kill you
by eating everything.
Readit News
Also works great for hangovers.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3292407/
While it doesn’t alleviate all of the hangover symptoms it does nearly eliminate all of the most unpleasant ones.
[1] https://zbiotics.com
Deleted Comment
Take something like Broccomax - or eat lots of Brussels sprouts, and broccoli.
The best use I can think of is for undercover agents to drink heavily and avoid intoxication!
My mother for example hate the feeling of being intoxicated, even a little. So she only drink one glass on occasions and barely finishes it. She would definitely enjoy it more if she could have different wines over the course of a meal. It would also be useful if you want to enjoy the taste of some drinks with alcohol but you need to drive or you are in an on-call schedule.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.6b00975
_But_ they also make you less drunk and making the drunkenness less... pleasant?
Sample size of like... 4 nights out having nomihoudai.
But it's the fun of alcohol!
What'd be amazing would be something that really works against the headaches and/or prevent vomiting. Basically something for the next day or even the next two days (when you get old, if you party too hard it can take two days to feel good again: I hate it so at 50 I very rarely party hard anymore: maybe once a year).
However, people often tend to drink for the "good" effects that this gel prevents. If what you want is alcohol's fun, then you're going to need another cure (essentially an IV drip, and drugs to replace the hormones and loosen your blood vessels - all of which are not readily available for other good reasons).
If you start vomiting then you overdid it. Your body is trying to save you from poisoning. To prevent the headaches just drink lots of water.
For a while it is. But sometimes you don’t want to keep being drunk.
Maybe you want to drive home, or your childcare ends, or you just have other things to do that day.
If I could just end the whole thing at will, including the hangovers you mention, that would be ideal.
you sure you didn't just lower your tolerance?
Meh, I like wine more and more and being drunk less and less, one is seriously limiting the other :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disulfiram
(if you take it, you will get sick if you drink alcohol)
Personally, tequila works on me in a similar way when I smell it.
So this gel seems like drinking less booze with extra steps. I do see a use for women and undercover cops though. Or to make people think you are drunker than you are.
But if their way of partying is to get drunk, this gel will prevent them from partying, since getting drunk requires the alcohol to get into your bloodstream.
EDIT: Apparently acetic acid _does_ have calories. Didn't know that.
Calories are measured by burning the substance. While it very precisely determines contained energy in the physics sense, it's a question whether all that energy is used by digestion? Especially if it's something the body treats as a toxin and wants to remove as soon as possible?
Also, substances like ethanol and acetic acid are not digested, they pretty much just go straight into the bloodstream. There is a limit on how much e.g. ethanol the liver can process per hour, which does put a cap on how many of ethanol's calories are released as ATP + body heat. Acetic acid is a normal temporary metabolite though and so its consumption is much more complete (it gets used by cells all over).
From this article[0] it seems ~60% of the calories in lager come from the alcohol - presumably ~40% come from carbohydrates. And from Google, acetic acid is 349 kcal / 100g, versus pure ethanol at 700 kcal / 100g. So if this approach converted 100% of alcohol to acetic acid, you'd drop the calories from lager by ~30% overall. To your question, dry wine or lower-carb beer would be proportionally even better.
The flip-side of this is perhaps consumption of too much acetic acid! It's impossible to calculate potential toxicity without understanding the strength of the acetic acid generated, though.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331119759_Nutrition...
Metabolism matters. Gasoline is over 800kcal/100g, but you wouldn't get that much from it (if anything at all).
Alcohol has a particularly long metabolic pathway, which after ingesting approximately 20-30g gets cut short to one where acetic acid is excreted (commonly known as "breaking the seal") and the overall upper energy yield limit becomes approximately 110kcal/100g.
Executive summary is that on a given session it's the first two 12oz (330ml) beers which provide most of the calories from alcohol and their contribution is on par with a snickers bar.
The latest science says the safe number of drinks might be one. Per week. If you’re not keeping it to that you’re harming your health. (And if you’re keeping it to one per week there’s no need to break it down in the body) just keep it out of there to begin with.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/07/10/327854051/al...
edit: ah, I read TFA:
> "Yeast can degrade ethanol," says microbiologist Benjamin Tu of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. "But they love other sugars — glucose, maltose — more. When those sugars are around, the cells turn off the genes needed for alcohol degradation."
Deleted Comment
Likely no. This stuff will destroy the alcohol before it enters the bloodstream. So it sounds useful to stop people absorbing more alcohol (pumping the stomach situations) but won't do much for alcohol already in the blood and causing effects in the body.
Quitting alcohol requires medical supervision for those who are deep into alcohol use disorder.
perhaps what you really want is something to block glucose absorption?