Is there any difference from your livers perspective to drink slower, but still at capacity (i.e. 1 standard drink per hour) or is it the same as drinking a lot of drinks at the same time and the liver getting ‘backed up’? Is one of them better for your liver? Is there a ‘waiting room’ per se?
In: 200
Yes. You only break down alcohol so fast. One of the intermediate steps of the chain it breaks down into is acetate – nail polish remover. If you are drinking more than you can process you end up with that kind of garbage sitting in queue longer to be broken down and get scarring.
There are also some people who have a gene that dumps excess into the intestine for processing and its much slower and worse at it and it breaks down the bacteria in your gut as a side effect and creates irritants (cytokines) that have inflammatory responses throughout the body. That happens to an extent, regardless, but for “super drinkers” (I can drink a 12 pack and not feel anything!) its because theyre damaging their body in other ways.
A drink an hour is safe but you also only have so many enzymes sitting there waiting to break alcohol down, its a limited reserve. Which is why coffee and eggs is so often appealing is ovoprotein (egg protein) is a component of rebuilding it all. You’re also dehydrated because your liver thinks its being poisoned (it is) and it stops processing liquids which is why you can drink a gallon of water, pee it all out, and not be hydrated still.
Alcohol is a drug and, like any other drug, you can use, misuse, and abuse it. Safe drug use for alcohol is 2-3 drinks at an hour each a few times a week.
There is an interesting documentary [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4953130/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4953130/) on this topic specifically with two twins drinking 21 units of alcohol a week – one drinking every day, the other drinking it all in one sitting. Very interesting!
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