– Why is achohol so potent on breath but nothing else seems to be? You don’t pass a random on the street and are like, dayum that guy been eating grilled cheese.

Question

– Why is achohol so potent on breath but nothing else seems to be? You don’t pass a random on the street and are like, dayum that guy been eating grilled cheese.

In: Other

Answer 1

Ethanol is an example of a “volatile compound”, a substance that is able to directly transform into a gas and leave a liquid… like your blood. When your blood goes to your lungs to pick up oxygen, ethanol essentially boils out of your blood into the lungs, and you exhale it.

There are a lot of other compounds that can do this, most notably the allyl methyl sulfide from garlic. So you can pass a rando and say “Dayum that guy has been eating garlic.”

Most foods either don’t contain high concentrations of volatiles, or those volatiles are not as distinctive as the smell of alcohol or garlic. though.