The Truth About Booze: Distinguishing Fact From Fiction

Roger Highfield, New Scientist Magazine

Does James Bond's favorite tipple really taste better when shaken rather than stirred? Check out these tall tales and improbable truths about alcohol:

TRUE OR FALSE?

1. Drinking coffee will get you sober faster.

False. Caffeine might wake you up, but it won't lower your blood alcohol level. In fact, a cup of coffee may make it harder for you to realize you're drunk, according to Thomas Gould of Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. In experiments on mice, reported in Behavioral Neuroscience, he found that caffeine -- the equivalent of between one and eight cups of coffee for humans -- made the rodents more alert but did nothing to reverse the cognitive impairment caused by alcohol, such as their inability to avoid stimuli they should have known were unpleasant.

In other words, a shot of caffeine after a binge may simply fool drunk people into thinking they're sober.

2. Beer, then liquor, never sicker. Liquor, then beer, never fear. (Or, if you prefer: "Drink beer then wine, you'll feel fine. Drink wine and beer, you'll feel queer.")

False. There's no chemical interaction between these drinks that makes you feel particularly bad the next day. It's the total amount of alcohol consumed that matters. Perhaps when you've already had a skinful of beer you'll drink more shots, and more quickly, as your self-control will be reduced.

What's less clear is whether darker drinks such as bourbon are more likely to give you a hangover than a clear spirit like vodka. The idea that they do appeared to be confirmed by a study at Brown University, R.H. One possible difference is that the dark drinks have a higher concentration of congeners, the by-products of fermentation.

However, another study, at Boston University School of Public Health, found no connection between the intensity of the resulting hangover and the type of alcohol drunk. Clearly, more research is required.

Martinis should be shaken, not stirred true, for most people's taste. James Bond ordered his vodka martinis "shaken, not stirred," but is there really any difference? Yes there is, according to a team at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.

They studied the ability of the classic martini, made with gin and vermouth, to deactivate hydrogen peroxide, which is a potent source of free radicals. They showed that martinis were more effective at deactivating hydrogen peroxide than their main ingredients alone. For reasons that are not clear, the shaken mix was twice as effective as the stirred mix.

But does the resulting cocktail taste better? One suggestion is that an agitated martini contains more microscopic shards of ice, giving it a more pleasant texture or "mouthfeel." However, the most likely reason for Bond's preference seems to be because it helps reduce the taste of residual oil left over when vodka is made from potatoes, the base vegetable used at the time Ian Fleming wrote his books.

3. Hanging a spoon in the top of an opened champagne bottle preserves its fizz.

False. It's hard to imagine how a spoon could trap bubbles, but it's the experimental evidence that counts. To investigate, New Scientist asked people to blind taste champagne which had been opened and stored either with or without a suspended spoon, and rate the fizz against freshly opened champagne.

The result? A spoon has no effect at all. The most likely explanation for the myth is that an opened bottle of champagne keeps its bubbles for much longer than most people expect.

Champagne gets you drunker than wine: true. The bubbles in champagne do seem to make a difference. A study in Alcohol and Alcoholism concluded that it may be more intoxicating than wine.

The reason remains a mystery. Perhaps bubbles open the pyloric valve in the stomach, letting the alcohol reach the intestine and hence the bloodstream more quickly. Alternatively fizzy drinks might increase the rate of alcohol absorption by stimulating the lining of the stomach.

4. Elephants get drunk on marula fruit.

False. There have been anecdotal reports of drunken elephants for years, and a team from the University of Bristol in the UK recently found that fallen marula fruit naturally ferment to an ethanol content of around 3 percent. They calculate, however, that this means that to get drunk, an elephant would have to consume "a diet of only marula fruit at a rate of at least 400 percent normal maximum food intake" (Physiological and Biochemical Zoology). This, as they say, "seems extremely unlikely."

Perhaps another intoxicant is responsible. Elephants also eat marula tree bark, which is home to beetle pupae traditionally used to poison arrow tips.

Different wines go with different types of food true -- up to a point. There are exceptions to the "red wine with red meat, white wine with fish" rule; some red wines go well with seafood. But one reason the saying makes scientific sense has been reported by a team from the Japanese winemaker Mercian Corporation (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry).

They asked a team of tasters to sample 38 red wines and 26 white wines while dining on scallops. The wines all contained different amounts of iron, which the researchers say is the result of a variety of factors, including soil type and contamination during harvesting. They found that wines containing high levels of iron left an unpleasant fishy aftertaste. Bottom line: low-iron red wines might be a good match with seafood.

5. Dmitri Mendeleev established the optimum alcoholic strength for vodka.

False. Vera Grigorieva of the Oval vodka company in Moscow, Russia, laid this myth to rest at a conference last year in Budapest, Hungary. She found that vodka with an alcohol content of around 40 percent by volume was introduced at the end of the 17th century, long before Mendeleev was born.

Yet the man behind the periodic table did study how the volume of ethanol-water solutions varies with concentration. He found a minimum occurs when ethanol and water are mixed in a ratio of 1:3 (Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry). His work played no role in formulating regulations for vodka manufacturers, but it's now being followed up by a team of Russian and American scientists who are searching for a way to measure molecular structure in vodkas, to see if this varies in different brands, and whether it might be linked to perceptible changes in taste (Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry).

6. Wine consumption explains the 'French paradox.'

False. French people suffer a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease, despite having a diet rich in saturated fats. Some suggest that this phenomenon, known as the French paradox, is linked with drinking red wine, which contains a chemical called resveratrol.

In fact, the amounts found in red wine are too small to be responsible, says Dirk Lachenmeier, of the Chemical and Veterinary Investigation Agency in Karlsruhe, Germany. Epidemiological evidence shows that the health effects of alcohol are generally the same, irrespective of the type of drink. It's the amount of alcohol that matters. There's some evidence that moderate alcohol consumption may protect the heart. However, the risks for cancer of the mouth, pharynx, larynx, oesophagus, liver, bowel and breast all rise with the amount of alcohol consumed.

7. Only quality wines form 'legs' or 'tears' on the side of the glass.

False. After a sip of wine, "legs" of liquid typically form inside the glass. But they're not an indication of quality, rather of alcohol content. Legs or tears arise because wine is, essentially, a solution of ethanol in water, and this mixture has a much lower surface tension than pure water (Journal of Chemical Education).

When the solution wets the side of the glass, alcohol rapidly evaporates from the thin layer on the glass surface. With less alcohol, this layer has a higher surface tension so it pulls on liquid from regions of lower surface tension, and higher alcohol. As a result, the wine flows up the sides of the glass. When enough liquid gathers at the top, drops form, and when they are heavy enough, they roll down, leaving tracks resembling tears.

The phenomenon of liquid flow driven by surface tension gradients, which occurs in many other places than wine glasses, is called the Gibbs-Marangoni effect. The legs might be interesting to watch, but they don't reveal whether the wine is any good.

8. Absinthe is a hallucinogen.

False. Of the drinks that purportedly contain chemicals with an extra kick, absinthe is perhaps the most infamous. In 19th-century Europe, it was blamed for causing hallucinations, mental instability and criminal behavior. The "green fairy" enjoyed by Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde and Vincent van Gogh developed such a reputation that most European countries banned it early in the 1900s.

The ingredient of this electric-green spirit that was supposedly responsible is wormwood, an aromatic, bitter shrub that contains a chemical called thujone. But thujone is not a hallucinogen. Nor does it have a cannabis-like action, though it is toxic to nerve cells and causes seizures at high concentrations. According to work published this year by Dirk Lachenmeier of the Chemical and Veterinary Investigation Agency in Karlsruhe, Germany, it is not present in significant quantities (The Open Addiction Journal).

The consensus today is that absinthism was either simple alcohol poisoning -- some absinthes were 70 percent alcohol, nearly double the strength of most distilled drinks -- or caused by methanol and other adulterants found in some cheap liquor.

8. You'll get drunk faster if you drink through a straw.

False. Unless you suck alcohol through a straw more rapidly than you glug, drinking through a straw does not raise your blood alcohol level faster than other ways of drinking. The myth that it does may have arisen because drinks which come with straws often have a fruity flavor that masks the taste of alcohol, making you more likely to down them faster. Another possibility is that straws are more often used by women, who metabolize alcohol differently from men (New England Journal of Medicine), and who may therefore be more susceptible to its effects.

9. Ale drinkers will develop a beer belly.

False. Alcohol is highly calorific. A liter of continental lager contains about 350 kilocalories, and a typical British pint of bitter is about 170 kcal.

If anyone is going to notice the belt-busting effects of beer it should be the Czechs, who consume more beer per person than drinkers in any other country. Yet a study of almost 2000 Czechs published in 2003 in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition failed to find a link between the amount of beer consumed and the size of the drinker's stomach. A subsequent analysis of data from a different group of drinkers did find a slight but statistically significant increase in their girth, yet this remains unpublished.

10. There are plenty of ways to defeat a hangover.

False. Anyone hoping to neutralize the excesses of a night on the town by turning to hangover cures will be disappointed. After reviewing evidence for the curative benefits of bananas, aspirin, Vegemite, fructose, glucose, artichoke, prickly pear and the drugs tropisetron and tolfenamic acid, Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Carroll at Indiana University concluded in a paper published two years ago: "No scientific evidence supports any cure or effective prevention for alcohol hangovers."

The truth is that other factors, including lack of sleep, smoking, overeating, snoring and all those other activities that occur during and after a heavy night also play a part, making a truly effective treatment for hangovers unattainable. As for the hair of the dog, it does not take a toxicologist to point out that a couple of pints at 8 o'clock next morning simply makes a hangover last longer.

Your best hope? That you're one of around a quarter of drinkers naturally resistant to hangovers. According to a team led by Jonathan Howland at the Boston University School of Public Health, that's probably a result of genetic differences in the way alcohol and acetaldehyde are metabolized (Addiction).

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