I’m not a huge drinker. People always talk about getting different kinds of drunk on different kinds of alcohol. To your body, isn’t alcohol just alcohol? Sure, proof would matter, but does your body know the difference beyond that?
In: Biology
There are other plant derived active substances in beer, wine and every other beverage. Alcohol is the same but theres different amount of it.
While what others say about the chemical composition of drinks being slightly different is true, this isn’t actually a very significant effect. Your main intuition that the body doesn’t really know the difference anyway is correct.
But people interpret situations differently and behave differently on different occasions – even without alcohol. For example,e when getting drunk on beer it was likely just a relaxed fun evening with some close friends, this will influence your behaviour when drunk much more than the type of alcohol. When people get drunk on tequila on the other hand, they probably set out to party hard and get drunk -leading to wildly different behaviour.
It isn’t so much the type of alcohol we drink but what mood we were in before getting drunk. It influences our choice of drink as well as our behavior when drunk.
Yes alcohol is alcohol but drinks often have other things in them e.g. some have a higher sugar content than others, which might impact how you feel / react physiologically.
However “mixing drinks” leading to a worse hangover is a myth – it’s just that mixing drinks is correlated to nights when people drink more alcohol in general.
Most alcohol that goes through your body is ethanol. However, in different beverages, you get minor components called fusel alcohols, which belong to a larger class of chemicals called congeners. These types of alcohols aren’t ethanol, but include alcohols like 2-methyl-2-butanol (2M2B, quite psychoactive, or other amyl alcohols), isopropyl alcohol, or 2-phenylethanol.
These alcohols do exert some effect, and may contribute to slight variations in how you feel with different alcoholic beverages. For example, you might’ve heard that some people tend to get more aggressive on darker beverages such as dark rum or whiskey. This is one explanation.
For instance, isopropyl alcohol is psychoactive in its own right. It has sedative effects of its own, is roughly twice as toxic as ethanol IIRC, and tends to only affect the GABA receptors rather than a myriad of receptors like ethanol does. In addition, its metabolite acetone is also psychoactive.
Edit: [Here’s a nice source](https://m.psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Comparison_of_psychoactive_alcohols_in_alcoholic_drinks) that runs through the most common fusel alcohols.
So, your body is made up these tiny building blocks, called ‘cells’. Each of these cells is like an empty container, and it wants to be filled with water. When all those cells are empty, your body need water, and that’s called ‘dehydration’.
There are a number of things that can cause dehydration. If you eat or drink certain foods, you might start to feel thirsty (yes! you can drink something that will make you even more thirsty! i swear! we’ll make really sugary lemon aid later!)
So, one of the big things about being hung over is that your body is dehydrated. That means all those cells we talked about are empty.
Now, let’s say you had 5 beers. the beer is ‘watered down’ alcohol. So, those cells wont be as empty/dehydrated because of the water in the beer.
But you can have 5 glasses of wine. Glasses of wine are smaller than a beer. So the alcohol content is higher, and there’s less ‘watered down’ drink in there. So those cells will be more empty/dehydrated than if you had the beer.
Further more, you could have a straight up shot of alcohol. That has nothing else. it’s just the alcohol. So those cells are even more empty/dehydrated than if you had the wine (or, obviously, the beer).
Finally, you could have a drink like a margaretta (that’s what mommy like to drink out of those silly looking cups). She puts salt around the edge of the glass! salt will make you even more thirsty. So, if she had 5 of those drinks, the cells are going to be even more empty/dehydrated than if she drank just the shots!
That was my first attempt to actually explain like you were 5. I pretended I was telling this to my nearly 5 year old child.
I think it may need clarifying- all ETHANOL based drinks will do the same (relative to %)- not all alcohols do the same!
No. There’s no difference between alcohols. Like whiskey makes you angry or tequila makes you happy. Garbage.
The ratio of water to etoh makes a difference in how fast you get drunk. That’s about it.
If you start mixing substances like vodka and redbull, then you can get some different reactions.
If you drink a 5th of tequila or a 5th of whiskey, or a 5th of vodka it’s all the same assuming they’re the same proof. Anything anyone says different is anecdotal and there would be different circumstances.
People naturally look for patterns. And to a degree we are really good at it. But we often see patterns that aren’t there are misinterpret patterns. Tequila. I get way more drunk on tequila than I do on vodka or whiskey. Everytime I drink tequila I get really drunk and fight people. The obvious pattern is the Tequila. Nevermind that I don’t actually count how many drinks I have, or what I had to eat, or how late I was up till, or the other drinks I had before the tequila, or if I had water, or what activities I did before, or who I am drinking with, or why I am drinking.
So is Tequila a magical fight liquor? No, but I’m not recognizing all the other patterns that occur, only the most obvious. Anyone smart enough to realize how other factors involved play a role, would not loudly declare ” I can’t drink tequila, it makes me fight people”. So the myth is perpetuated from the dumbest outward to less dumb people who are now primed to recognize a pattern.
TL:DR, alcohol is alcohol but people are dumb.
Also, your body has a set-point metabolism for breaking down alcohol, so drinking coffee, sleeping, etc… doesn’t make you recover any faster (though sleeping does pass the time to get you closer).
In this case, people are associating certain drinks with the ease they can put them away. People getting “fucked up” on tequila, etc. are really just saying “I like the taste of this mixed drink, and the social situation where I drink it, so I tend to drink more, faster”
Latest Answers