How come when you puke from food poisoning from bad food you’ll avoid that food (even if you know it’s not bad) for a long, long time but when you throw up from alcohol it’s usually only a couple of days before you’re willing to try again?

Question

If you have some bad lasagna it can give you a pretty rough time for about 24 hours. It’s not unusual afterward for it to take ages before you’re able to even look at lasagna again. If you go on a bender there’s a pretty good possibility it’s going to make you feel the same way as the lasagna did for about the same length of time, but the chances are you’ll be ready to drink alcohol again within a couple of days. Why is that? Why does our body “learn” to protect itself from spoiled food that makes you sick but not from too much alcohol which does the same?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Because early humans didn’t have the luxury of abstaining from beverages that made them sick, so we are not as likely to develop that aversion. If one became sick from contaminated water and abstained from water as a result, he/she would die of thirst.

Instead, we developed alternative ways to avoid bad liquids- even today, we generally don’t like drinking warm water because warmth breeds stagnation.

In contrast, we have a lot of choices when it comes to food, so aversion to one specific food that caused an illness would actually have some benefits or at least fewer drawbacks.