Adding oxygen to booze speeds sobriety

[n2doc]

BOOZE that has been treated so that you sober up faster afterwards may sound like a drinker's dream, but could end up being their downfall if it encourages heavy drinkers to consume even more alcohol.

Kwang-il Kwon and his colleagues at Chungnam National University in Daejeon, South Korea, gave 30 men and 19 women 360 millilitres of a drink containing 19.5 per cent alcohol by volume, about the strength of fortified wine or sake. The drinks also contained 8, 20 or 25 parts per million of dissolved oxygen, which is known to play a role in alcohol breakdown by the body.

It took about 5 hours for the blood alcohol levels of volunteers to reach zero. But Kwon's team found that on average, those whose drinks contained 20 or 25 ppm of oxygen went to zero 23 minutes and 27 minutes faster respectively than those who had the lowest-oxygen drinks (Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-0277.2010.01155.x).

The researchers suggest that enriching alcoholic drinks with oxygen might "allow individuals to become sober faster". "The reduced time to a lower blood-alcohol concentration may reduce alcohol-related accidents," they write.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527503.200-adding-oxygen-to-booze-speeds-sobriety.html

[applegrove]

1. Yup. When I was binge drinking due to PTSD the only thing that

would stop me from drinking was passing out.

[RC]

2. And this extra Oxygen does what to the liver when it is dealing with the alcohol?

Or the brain for that matter.

[Cirque du So-What]

4. Offhand, I'd say the addition of oxygen

would contribute to the creation of free radicals.

[RC]

5. And that would be costly.

[NNadir]

6. Which is why all aerobic living things contain the highly conserved SOD protein.

This almost certain works by speeding oxidation to acetaldehyde - a toxicity problem in it's own right, and part of the reason the liver is a target organ for alcohol damage.

Potentially there are enzymes in the digestive tract that may accomplish this oxidation in the presence of oxygen, although I don't know that.

Acetaldehyde is however, fairly volatile, which is an advantage, I speculate, in causing it to be excreted through the lungs, even if absorbed, lowering it's half life.

[Jamastiene]

3. My MO was to get drunk and stay that way, not sober up.

Then again, the dry heaves sometimes got to me the next morning when I got up to a fifth of vodka a night. Still, that idea seems to beg the question, Why drink at all if you don't want to get drunk and stay drunk? Maybe, that's just me. o.0