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It's long been known that eating food before or while you drink alcohol slows down how quickly the alcohol goes into your blood. But now a new study has shown that mixing alcohol with diet soda delivers the alcohol into the bloodstream faster than mixing it with regular soda.
You read that right... you'll get drunk faster drinking Rum and Coke Zero than you will drinking regular Rum and Coke.
Why? Because when alcohol hits the stomach with a diet soda mixer, the stomach simply absorbs the alcohol directly, whereas when alcohol hits the stomach with with a sugary soda, the stomach thinks it is food and starts the digestive process, which slows down the absorption of the alcohol.
A couple of points to this new study at Northern Kentucky University I found interesting:
1)Four shots of vodka with sugary soda mixer put the participants just below the legal DUI limit, while four shots with a diet soda put them over.
2)Subjects said they felt the same no matter what they drank, even though tests showed the diet drinkers were about one-fifth more intoxicated. It was the equivalent of drinking a fifth shot, although the participants said they didn't feel any different.
It's a small study, just 8 men and 8 women, but the result was large enough to grab attention.
What a sad commentary on education/research - a few data points* are tossed out and "presto" - a press release designed to generate more funding. Meh.
(I dug up the study in detail, and here's the problem: BAC is a rate - thus the measures should be rate over time for both sample sets*. I, for one, would be interested in the curve, specifically, does one type show an increase in BAC sooner than the other, and does one show decreases sooner than the other; in other words, if one drinks "diet", do they "sober up" quicker?* according to the source document, tests were carried out in a somewhat random pattern - not a sign of quality research)
I agree, it's not high quality research, but it produced a pronounced effect, and it's interesting...
Well, I suppose that getting on CNN is an effect
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