VALO'S ARCHIVE

Pharmacokinetics of Alcohol, BAC, Effects At Specific B.A.C. Levels When alcohol enters your body, it isn’t digested like most substances. It’s absorbed quickly, and is seen as a toxin , so your body therefore will primarily use the liver to metabolize the alcohol. And while I don’t want to give a full biology lesson here, the liver works at about a “drink an hour” pace (which is where that age-old rate of recommended consumption likely comes from). Until it’s all metabolized, it’s all over your body, in your blood, visiting your brain, etc (3) . And, of course, because it’s in your blood, it’s therefore in your lungs. This is the cause of the alcohol breath that most people refer to. In simple terms, it’s “in the process of being processed” alcohol, and it has a distinct, somewhat sweet, odor. You probably know the smell I’m talking about (it’s also why the “alcohol smell” on someone intoxicated will smell remarkably similar, regardless if the alcohol consumed was whiskey, beer...

We run into all these different kinds of alcohol. Let's look at the differences. First there's the drinkable alcohol, like whiskey, beer and wine. This is ethyl alcohol that is produced by yeast. The yeast eat some kind of sugar or starch and turn it into carbon dioxide and alcohol. In wine the process is pretty simple - yeast eats the sugar in grape juice and creates alcohol. In whiskey, the alcohol is distilled to get the concentration higher. See how whiskey works for information on distillation. Ethanol that you purchase as a car fuel is the same kind of alcohol found in whiskey, but it has been distilled to the point where it is nearly pure alcohol (as opposed to whiskey which is typically only 40% alcohol and 60% water). See this page and this page for a quick introduction to ethanol production. Denatured alcohol - found in bottles at the hardware store or the drug store - is also ethanol. But it has been poisoned to keep people from drinking it. It turns out that...

(edheee shpjegimi logjik pse sherbehet mezja me pije alkoolike... The body maintains an adequate level of glucose in the blood using various mechanisms, one of which is gluconeogenesis in the liver.  Gluconeogenesis is particularly significant at hours distant to meals when glucose released to the bloodstream from the liver is more prominent than dietary intake. Biochemically, pyruvate and oxaloacetate at the initials steps of the gluconeogenesis pathway are shunted away due to increased levels of NADH that occur as a result of alcohol comsumption, so these molecules cannot be utilized to form new molecules of glucose. On the other hand, glycolysis, which uses the available glucose for production of energy and several other purposes, is also prevented by the same high levels of NADH. Alcohol consumed, namely ethanol is metabolised by the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase.  This enzyme uses NAD as a cofactor to oxidise ethanol and produce acetaldehyde while NAD is reduced t...