High
Blood Alcohol --or a Zinc Deficiency?
Information
courtesy of Lawrence Taylor - DUIblog
I
mentioned in my previous post that the single greatest flaw in so-called
"breathalyzers" is that they are designed to assume that
all humans are physiologically identical. This is, of course, a
false assumption, and I have mentioned examples in other posts of
erroneous breath analysis attributable to human variability. In
the coming days, I will take a look at some further examples. Let's
take a look at one.....
Scientific
research appears to indicate that in some cases a high blood alcohol
level may not be indicative of alcohol consumption, but rather may
be caused by a deficiency of zinc.
In
a study conducted at the University of North Dakota and reported
in 46 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 688 (1987), researchers
experimented with the physiological effects of diets that had varied
amounts of zinc. They discovered that the metabolism of alcohol
was dramatically affected by zinc intake. For example, they found
that for those subjects on a low zinc diet, blood alcohol concentrations
(BACs) increased rapidly within 15 minutes of consumption of measured
amounts of alcohol: roughly twice as much alcohol was present in
their blood at this time as was present in those subjects on normal
zinc diets. Furthermore, greater amounts of alcohol remained in
the blood for a longer period of time when there was a zinc deficiency
-- that is, elimination rates were decreased.
Thus,
it appears that an individual with an insufficient amount of zinc
in his diet will have higher peak BAC levels, and the alcohol will
remain in his blood for a longer period of time. Among other things,
this would render invalid any attempts at retrograde extrapolation
-- that is, estimating earlier BAC levels when driving based upon
presumed rates of absorption and elimination.
The
human body is highly variable and, for that reason alone, police
breathalyzers will never be able to provide reliable blood alcohol
analysis.
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