Is it because the food absorbs the ethanol which lowers its effects on the body? Because that’s what I assumed.
In: Biology
Basically the food absorbs the alcohol. This slows down how fast it enters the system. You will still absorb the booze but it takes longer.
Nope. First you need to know alcohol is absorbed in the large intestine rather than the stomach. When you’re belly is full it takes longer for the alcohol to get where it needs go go and there’s more stuff to deal with for your body.
Jn other words your tolerance is the same, stay up long enough and all the extra booze you drank will keep you entertained. 🙂
It slows down the intake of alcohol in your small intestine, because alcohol is “watered down” by food, so its effects are lessened and prolonged in time. Otherwise, if you take a shot on an empty stomach, it gets sucked in almost immediately, and all at once, assuring you get a hard hit.
*Some quick googling to remind myself about the biochemistry*
Eating food helps raise your blood sugar before/during alcohol intake. Ethanol inhibits the glycolic process (breakdown of sugars) since the product of processing it directly steals from the process of ATP formation which is your energy molecules throughout your body.
Alcohol absorbs into your body all through your GI tract. Your intestines absorb it the quickest, while the stomach absorbs at a much slower rate. When you eat before, your intestines are more full so the alcohol spends more time in your stomach, slowly being absorbed into your body. When you drink on an empty stomach, the alcohol makes its way to the intestines where it’s absorbed much quicker.
I once read that it was because when your stomach is empty, the alcohol proceeds straight to the intestines to be absorbed into your blood stream. But if there was solid food in your stomach, you stomach’s sphincter would be closed, forcing the alcohol to wait there before being absorbed. This spreads out the absorption time, reducing the intoxicating effects, like others said, but also gives time for some of alcohol to be broken down by enzymes in the stomach and be rendered non-intoxicating.
So basically with drugs the quicker something enters the blood stream the bigger the high. I had a professor explain it to me like imagine getting to 100 mph it feels way more exciting going from 0-100 in 6 seconds than slowly going through the gears.
Like others have said the food slows the process of ingestion of the alcohol so you don’t a big hit of it at once. You will still eventually get all the alcohol just in a more measured manner so you don’t feel the big rush of getting loads dumped into your blood stream
most of the food you consume is actually made up mostly of water, so think of food as just little protein bags of water. booze is also mostly water, even a strong liquor is still at least 50 percent water. let’s say you drink a glass of whiskey on an empty stomach, your stomach will be dealing with a liquid mixture thats 40 percent booze 60 percent water. if you drink the same glass of whiskey but you already had a meatball sub, you’ll be adding that same booze to basically another big bag of water, which dilutes the whiskey into something more like a wine. your liver then processes the mixture of wine-strengthed stomach contents evenly, so it’s not encountering a huge bumrush of alcohol, and therefore doesn’t send the booze to your brain in huge quantities.
It doesn’t. Or rather, it’s more accurate to say that it just delays the introduction of the alcohol into your bloodstream. And since your liver is also filtering-out the alcohol at a certain rate per hour…
So it really depends on how much you’re drinking in a given session. With food delaying the absorption rate, if you cut-off your drinking at somewhat of an early point in time…
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