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
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.
ELI5: it’s make-believe to think different booze makes you feel differently. It’s an effect of your mind’s creation. Ethanol is ethanol, end of story. If there’s other forms of alcohol in your drink, then you’d be very sick, dead, or there wouldn’t be enough to tell a difference.
Man this is a bad ELI5. So many responses that completely nonsense. OP: don’t listen to any of these folks unless they have a source. Like this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2965491/
Results:
**Findings suggested that individuals may expect different effects from consuming different types of alcoholic beverages.** Participants expressed more agreement that wine would have relaxation effects and rated this effect more positively. Participants expressed more disagreement that beer or shots would have effects on sexuality and rated sexuality effects more positively for wine. Participants reported less agreement that wine would have impairing effects, as well as more disagreement that wine would affect risk, aggression, and self-perception. Impairing effects of wine were also viewed less negatively than other condition beverages.
Conclusions:
Findings suggest that individuals may hold different beliefs about the effects of wine, compared with beer and shots of distilled spirits. Research and interventions targeting general alcohol expectancies may miss important between-beverage differences in **perceived effects and subjective evaluations regarding alcohol’s effects.**
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).
It’s just ethanol, anyone who says otherwise is completely wrong. A few people here are stating things like subtypes of alcohol and different mixers, this is complete and utter nonsense as the psychoactive properties are negligible in the quantities consumed (other than ethanol). The only somewhat caveat to that is that doing drinks with sugar in them can make you less drunk and low blood sugar can make you feel much more drunk.
The real reason is that people typically choose what they are drinking based off of their mood
Bad day = Whiskey
Party Funtime = Tequila
“Lets get ripped brah” = “lets mix Jaegar, Fireball and jetfuel and butt chug it”….then the next morning they say, “fireball makes me act crazy”
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”
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The amount of water and sugar (and other stuff) will change how it effects you. For example I was drinking whiskey one night and realised I was getting thirsty because I wasn’t getting enough water.
And yeah you will feel different if you get a big dose of alcohol at once to if you drank it slower.
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