Alcohol

What is the Character of Alcohol?

File photo. Credit: NDTV Food Although there are many types of alcohol—beer, wine, brew, booze, hooch, moonshine, vino, sauce, spirits—the term “alcohol” commonly refers to the specific alcohol compound in beer, wine, and spirits.

Its technical name is ethanol, or ethyl alcohol. Ethanol is commonly abbreviated to EtOH, shorthand often preferred by health professionals. In this article, when we use the term alcohol, we are referring to ethanol.

Other types of alcohol are unsafe to drink. The simplest alcohol is methanol, also called methyl alcohol or wood alcohol, a solvent used in paints and for woodworking.

Some years ago, down-on-their-luck alcoholics thought they had discovered a way to save money—wood alcohol, used at that time to heat chafing dishes, was intoxicating but considerably cheaper than beer or wine. Unfortunately, methanol causes blindness and death.

Methanol is no longer used in these products, but methanol poisoning from other sources still occurs. Today, methanol is used in a number of consumer products, including paint strippers, duplicator fluid, model airplane fuel, and dry gas. Most winshield washer fluids are 50 percent methanol.

Alcohol Consumption: Short-Term Effects

Drinking alcohol is associated with several effects: greater relaxation; more sociability; and distorted thinking, decision-making, and reaction time. Alcohol’s influence also disrupts one’s coordination when engaged in physical and mental activity, can increase risk taking, and, for many, impair ability to control temper and anger.

These effects of alcohol can be accentuated if drinking is combined with use of other drugs. When a person consumes a large amount of alcohol in a single occasion, it is called binge drinking. A hangover occurs when a person consumes a large amount of alcohol and feels ill several hours later or the next day. There is some evidence, however, that adolescents are less sensitive to the short-term effects of alcohol than adults (Spear, 2002).

Drinking to the point of getting drunk at least once is a common experience for adolescents. Drunken behavior includes impaired coordination and judgment, slurred speech, and the smell on a person’s breath or clothing. Symptoms of a hangover include headache, stomach ache, low blood sugar, dehydration, and possibly an irritation of the lining of the digestive system.

Alcohol Consumption: Long-Term Effects

The long-term health effects of using alcohol on a person who consumes alcohol heavily on a regular basis can be very deleterious. The chronic user is likely to suffer from numerous health problems, including cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, high blood pressure, brain damage, nerve damage, and cancers of the gastrointestinal tract. At the extreme level, it can cause death.

Other victims of the long-term effects of alcohol are unborn babies of pregnant women who drink. Prenatal exposure to alcohol can cause fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) or fetal alcohol effects (FAE); symptoms of these disorders include facial abnormalities, growth deficiencies, learning disabilities, memory deficits, and hyperactivity and other behavioral disorders.

Alcohol: Is It a Nutrient?

Alcohol eludes easy classification. Like fat, protein, and carbohydrate, it provides energy when metabolized. Laboratory experiments in the nineteenth century demonstrated that upon oxidation, pure alcohol releases 7 kilocalories per gram, but many people doubted it actually produced energy in the body.

These doubts were the basis of the controversial conclusion that alcohol was not food — a conclusion used by early Prohibitionists in their fight against alcohol. However, a classic series of experiments by energy researchers Francis Atwater and Wilbur Benedict showed that alcohol did indeed produce 7 kilocalories per gram in the body — findings that were a great disappointment to the temperance movement, because they showed that alcohol was a food.

But alcohol’s status as a nutrient is more questionable. It is certainly different from any other substance in the diet. It provides energy but is not essential, performing no necessary function in the body. Unlike the nutrients, alcohol is not stored in the body. And for no nutrient are the dangers of over-consumption so dramatic and the window of safety so narrow.

In the small amounts most people usually consume, alcohol acts as a drug, producing a pleasant euphoria. For some people, it is addictive, with the characteristics of tolerance, dependence, and withdrawal symptoms. Certainty, alcohol is a substance available in the diet, but it does not meet the technical definition of a nutrient.