Transcript
I just learned some fun new alcohol science while researching a Gary Breka debunk video. But I'll give you guys a quick sneak preview. It's a real reason why the different types of alcohol can produce different hangovers and different health effects. So normally, most of the health problems that come from drinking alcohol arise not from the ethanol itself, but from the acetaldehyde which it gets broken down into before itself getting broken down again. And that acidaldehyde is way more toxic than ethanol. The thing is that most different types of alcohol, like gin, whiskey, beer, whatever, they all have, the same basic ethanol in them. So up until today, I basically thought that ethanol is ethanol, and the only difference when drinking it are the congeners, which are all the various side byproducts of the fermentation process that come along with the different types of alcohol. These things can have their own negative effect, or even somewhat impact the ethanol breakdown process, which we'll get into in a different video. But what I discovered today was something fascinating, which is that there is actually acetyldehyde itself as part of the byproducts of fermentation processes. This study reviewed a ton of different types of alcohol and looked at where they measured the amount of acid al-dehyde in the saliva right after consuming it, which is before your body really had a chance to start breaking it down into the acetaldehyde from ethanol. This table looks at different types of alcohol and the amount of acid al-dehyde found in them by all sorts of different studies. See how the beer is actually pretty low. It's usually in the several hundred range. Fortified wines are really high in the multiple thousand range. Bracarana, what is that, Bacanora, brandy cognac, those are all pretty bad. Rum seems to vary quite a bit. My guess is that's going to be due to the clear rum versus dark rum. Dark rum typically has a lot more in the way of those fermentation byproducts. Tequila, sort of middle of the road. Gin is a very clean alcohol. It is all the way towards the bottom down there. But mescal is super high. Again, the brown or the liquid, usually the more fermentation byproducts you got. geners, and in this case, that actually also means worse baseline acid aldehyde. Whiskey, not great. Tequila, not great. Vodka, again, pretty clean and distilled. And wine is pretty bad. It's got a lot of other stuff other than just the acetaldehyde, but in general, wine hangovers, yeah, they aren't great. And pure alcohol is as expected, pretty similar to the gin and vodka. And remember, acid aldehyde contributes to hangovers. badly in having headaches while drinking alcohol, and also to increased cancer risk and all sorts of other fun health problems. Stay tuned for a lot more alcohol science.
Additional notes
What type of alcohol gives you the worst hangover? This could be one of the big contributing factors (note that theres clearly a pretty wide variance even within types). #science #alcohol #health #hangovers #edutok
References
- No references found in the spreadsheet caption or matching Notion source page.