Why don't you get drunk when drinking?

The reason why each person's alcohol tolerance is different is because the amount of alcohol-degrading enzymes in each person's body is different. This leads to some people being able to drink a lot, while some people get drunk after just one drink. But we often see people on TV who can’t get drunk even if they drink several kilograms of liquor. Although these people may look very awesome, doctors say that liquor can cause great harm to their bodies. It is also particularly important to understand the reasons why you can drink without getting drunk.

Let’s start with the reasons why we blush. Many people think that it is caused by alcohol, but in fact it is caused by acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde has the function of dilating capillaries, and the dilation of facial capillaries is the reason for blushing. Therefore, people who blush when drinking alcohol can quickly convert ethanol into acetaldehyde, which means they have highly efficient alcohol dehydrogenase. But we can't forget another enzyme, aldehyde dehydrogenase. People who blush after drinking alcohol have only the first enzyme but not the second enzyme, so acetaldehyde accumulates rapidly in the body and cannot be metabolized for a long time, so their face will remain red for a long time. However, everyone has experience that the red color will gradually fade away after 1-2 hours. This is because the P450 in the liver slowly converts acetaldehyde into acetic acid, which then enters the TCA cycle and is metabolized.

So what about those people who are good at drinking? The more they drink, the paler their faces become, until at a certain point they suddenly can no longer hold on and become completely drunk. That is because such people do not have highly active alcohol dehydrogenase and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase, and mainly rely on P450 in the liver to slowly oxidize (because P450 is a group of oxidases with relatively low specificity). So, why do such people give people the impression that they can drink a lot? That's because they rely on body fluids to dilute alcohol, and the bigger they are, the more they seem to be able to drink. Under normal circumstances, they will fall into a coma only when the alcohol concentration exceeds 0.1%, which is half a catty of liquor for most southerners, while northerners, due to their large body size, can drink 8 taels to a catty of liquor. But no matter who he is, if his face gets paler the more he drinks, it is best not to drink more than half a pound, otherwise there is a possibility of acute alcohol poisoning.

What would happen if a person has both highly active alcohol dehydrogenase and highly active acetaldehyde dehydrogenase? He/she would be the legendary drunkard. How to tell if he/she is a drunkard? See if he/she sweats a lot. Because if both enzymes are highly active, alcohol will quickly turn into acetic acid and enter the TCA cycle to generate heat, so a lot of heat will occur and sweating will occur. If you meet such a person, you can only consider yourself unlucky. Even eight or ten normal people cannot beat him. Fortunately, there are not many such people, probably about one in 100,000.

One thing I want to remind everyone is that people whose faces turn red after drinking are actually less likely to damage their livers, while people whose faces turn white after drinking are particularly likely to damage their livers. People with red faces are generally less likely to be urged to drink, so they drink less. They feel sleepy after drinking, but they will be energetic again after sleeping for 15-30 minutes. The white-faced ones often don't know their own boundaries and drink too much in a state of high excitement until they are drunk. The alcohol in their bodies accumulates because there is no highly active enzyme to process it, causing liver damage. Alcoholic liver damage generally only occurs in these people. People with red faces can drink for several consecutive meals even if they vomit, while people with white faces need more time to rest because it takes one or two days to metabolize alcohol.

By the way, according to relevant research, people in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces (descendants of the ancient Wu and Yue states) seem to be the origin of the red face gene, which means that most of these people carry highly active alcohol dehydrogenase. Most people in the north have white faces. So if you were born in the north and have a red face, what does that mean? The answer is obvious, because the red face gene is a dominant gene.