Immaculate Intoxication
Information courtesy of Lawrence Taylor - DUIblog
Can alcohol be created by the human body itself -- without any drinking? Apparently so.
In an interesting scientific article, two physicians at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore reported that they detected the odor of beer in three of their patients. This was in an isolated hospital setting; there was no access to alcoholic beverages. The doctors had urine samples taken and analyzed by gas chromatography. Result? All three showed the presence of alcohol in their systems. Two of these were then tested for actual blood-alcohol concentration (BAC). One showed a BAC of .043%. The other was .121% -- or 1 1/2 times the legal limit for DUI!
"The presence of alcohol in human specimens containing glucose and yeast should come as no surprise," the two physicians wrote. "Several have made this observation. Under normal circumstances trace amounts of alcohol may be found in the blood; the alcohol is then channeled into an energy pathway by hepatic alcohol dehydrogenase...
"The Japanese report the "auto brewery syndrome" in which they have seen middle aged patients with bowel abnormalities, most often after surgery, who have yeast overgrowth, usually candida, in the G.I. tract and who ferment ingested carbohydrates, producing enough alcohol to result in drunkeness." Mullholland and Townsend, "Bladder Beer - A New Clinical Observation", 95 Transactions of the American Clinical Climatological Association 34 (1983).
In other words, the body is manufacturing alcohol by itself -- in some cases, enough to become legally intoxicated.
This has been confirmed by other studies. Swedish researchers, for example, have found that:
"Increasing evidence has emerged to show that endogenous ethanol does exist, the the concentrations seen have large inter-individual variations. Our results show a markedly skewed distribution of values...The reason for the wide inter-individuaal variation in healthy