February 17, 2021

Does the time it takes to get rid of alcohol vary by body, gender, or age?

Are Japanese people weak in alcohol, or is there a difference in strength or weakness in alcohol based on body size, age, or gender?

 

Bottom line, there is a difference!　If there are 100 people, you can expect that all 100 of them will have completely different strengths against alcohol.

Are you good with alcohol? Weak?

First of all, as I previously mentioned in “Are Japanese people weak against alcohol? “, it is said that the asian race, which makes up most of Japanese, tends to be weaker at drinking alcohol than European and African people.

When you drink alcohol, the alcohol in your body is metabolized by the liver, and a poisonous substance called acetaldehyde is produced during the process.

This acetaldehyde can cause headaches and heart palpitations. Whether you are a strong drinker or not depends largely on how well your type 2 acetaldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH2), the enzyme that breaks down acetaldehyde into harmless substances, works, but unfortunately, almost half of Japanese don’t have ALDH2 works well. So, as for Japanese people,  about half of them are weak in alcohol.

Weight

Furthermore, on an individual level, the difference in body weight can also change the strength against alcohol. For example, let’s say you drink a bottle of beer. If you divide the amount of alcohol consumed by a woman who weighs 40 kilograms and a woman who weighs 100 kilograms, the amount of alcohol consumed per kilogram of body weight will be more than double. Therefore, the way you get drunk is also different.

After all, the amount of alcohol consumed by a light-weight person is not simply equal to the amount of alcohol consumed by a heavy-weight person.

Age

And it actually depends on your “age”. The younger you are, the higher your ability to metabolize alcohol. In addition, after the toxic substance called acetaldehyde, which I mentioned earlier, is produced in the metabolic process, it produces oxidative stress that rusts the body, but the ability to counteract this stress is also stronger in younger people.

This means that you can drink a lot of alcohol when you are in your twenties, but as you get older, you will not be able to drink as much as you did when you were fifty or sixty. In other words, even for the same individual, the strength against alcohol changes from when they are young to when they are old.

After all, the metabolism of alcohol and acetaldehyde is better when we are young.

Gender difference

As for the difference between men and women, women have their own physiological phenomena. That is, the menstrual cycle. During menstruation, the balance of hormones in the body changes considerably from normal.

Therefore, it is known that if you drink alcohol during menstruation, it will take twice as long as your normal metabolism. I think it is a good idea to drink less or not drink at such times.

Finally.

As mentioned above, how strong you are against alcohol varies from individual to individual, and also depends greatly on your physical condition on that day. Women need to be careful when they are menstruating!　

As I said at the beginning of this article, if there are 100 people, 100 people are different, so it would be great if you could find out exactly how much and how to drink alcohol that suits you, so that you can enjoy drinking alcohol in a fun and delicious way.

 

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