People who blush when they drink it are destined to be conspicuous bags on the wine board.
Often after a few sips, the face begins to turn red, and slowly even spreads to the whole body, like a cooked shrimp 🦐.
Those who persuade wine say that this is a sign of being able to drink, come and go quickly, and it is not easy to get drunk;
According to the alcoholics, this is a typical manifestation of inability to drink and physical intolerance;
Some people also say that this is to drink too little, just practice!
It all sounds a little reasonable, people who drink alcohol and blush, is the amount of alcohol good or bad? Can you still drink it?
After carefully reading a large number of literature, we found that people who blush when they drink alcohol not only can't drink, but it also hurts their bodies if they continue to drink!
Drinking blush
In fact, it is a manifestation of poisoning
Blushing is a typical symptom after drinking alcohol, some people blush as soon as they drink it, some people don't get on their face until they drink it for a while, and some people blush after drinking too much. But either way, blushing is a sign of acetaldehyde buildup after drinking.
Image Credit: Do it yourself
Yes, that's right, it's acetaldehyde, a toxic substance that goes hand in hand with formaldehyde, a well-defined group I carcinogen. When it begins to accumulate in the body, it will cause irritation and even toxic damage to blood vessels, nerves, and muscle tissues throughout the body.
Common manifestations are increased skin temperature, telangiectasia, redness, rash, and even itching of the skin on the face and body.
Image Credit: Literature, Typical Asian Blush Syndrome
This type of poisoning is not limited to blushing, but also increases the heart rate and respiratory rate, and bronchoconstriction can cause a feeling of dry mouth and nausea. The more acetaldehyde accumulates, the more severe the reaction will be.
And if you don't pay attention to such signals and continue to drink, then the symptoms of "poisoning" will be more obvious: headache, mental confusion, and even blurred vision.
So where does acetaldehyde come from in people who drink alcohol and blush? In fact, it is an intermediate metabolite of the breakdown of alcohol in the body.
People who blush from alcohol lack an enzyme ("ALDH") in their body, which causes alcohol to be metabolized into acetaldehyde and cannot be further broken down, which causes acetaldehyde to accumulate in the body.
A trivia is that the poisoning reaction (disulfiram-like reaction) produced by "cephalosporin" is the same principle, cephalosporins inhibit acetaldehyde dehydrogenase, and acetaldehyde begins to accumulate - that is, every sip of alcohol and blushing people who drink alcohol is "cephalosporin and go".
Image source: Do it yourself
The scientific community has found that aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) deficiency is genetically determined, cannot be changed, and has a certain hereditary nature.
Remember, people who blush when they drink alcohol poison their bodies with every sip of alcohol. And the harm is more than that.
Blushing and drinking?
Carcinogenic, depressant, and aging
A growing body of research evidence shows that people who blush and drink alcohol are at greater risk than those who don't blush when they drink alcohol.
If you blush and drink it, the risk of cancer is higher.
For example, esophageal cancer, especially esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, which is highly malignant. There is data showing that people who drink alcohol and face red face drink two bottles of beer a day have a 6~10 times higher risk of esophageal cancer than people who do not blush.
Odds ratio of esophageal cancer to flushing response at different amounts of alcohol consumption (no matter how much they drank, people who drank alcohol and blushed had a higher risk of esophageal cancer than people who did not)
Image source: Literature
In addition, the risk of oral cancer, laryngeal cancer, alcoholic cirrhosis, and cardiovascular disease will also be much higher.
Blushing and drinking, more depressed.
In 2022, a study from South Korea showed that people who drank a little alcohol every day had a 23% higher risk of depression than those who never blushed after drinking.
According to the researchers, the accumulation of acetaldehyde in the body can interact with stress-related peptides and may trigger a depressive state; It also triggers the release of dopamine, which may be associated with inducing addictive behaviors that lead to depression with alcohol use disorder.
Blushing and drinking it again may also accelerate cell aging.
A new cutting-edge study, published in April, found that aldehydes, including acetaldehyde produced after alcohol, may also accelerate cellular aging.
At the molecular level, aldehyde-induced DNA-protein cross-links (DPCs) have been found to interfere with replication and transcription, leading to cell death if the crosslinks are not repaired in a timely manner. This means that aldehyde-induced DNA damage may also play a role in the aging process in healthy people.
Seeing this, maybe my friends who drink and blush will be sad, they all drink the same, why should I be hurt more than others!
Drinking blush
It may be the body protecting you
Don't be disappointed in your genes. Some scientists believe that this may be a protective mechanism.
You must know that no matter how well the body detoxifies alcohol, as long as you drink alcohol, it will cause direct harm to the body.
People who are prone to alcohol and blush are more sensitive to alcohol and feel uncomfortable when they drink it, so they are less prone to alcoholism, which invisibly reduces alcohol damage.
People who drink alcohol and blush can even be said to be born with a special alarm system:
"Alcohol? Poison! Poison!! Don't drink it!"
Scientists also found that the phenomenon of drinking alcohol blush has racial differences, and it is more common in East Asia, with about 36%~45% of people in China, Japan and South Korea blushing when they drink alcohol.
And the more interesting finding is that in the past 2000~3000 years, there have been more Asians with the blush gene for drinking.
In other words, drinking blush is a kind of genetic preference.
It is not clear why such a "preference" occurs. Some speculate that it may be due to protection against alcohol-related diseases (cirrhosis, etc.) caused by alcohol aversion, while others have found that this genetic variant leads to increased susceptibility to other diseases, such as the prevention of tuberculosis infection.
In short, the "drinking blush gene" may be a fortune left by the ancestors in order to protect this kind of people.
But such protection is premised on the fact that we are aware that:
Blush, don't drink!
Don't persuade a blushing person to drink either!
For those who drink and blush and you still persuade them, we can say with confidence: You are feeding poison!
Some small questions you may be concerned about:
How can you tell the difference between an alcohol allergy and an enzyme deficiency?
In medicine, there is no such thing as alcohol allergy, and symptoms such as rashes are manifestations of intolerance to incomplete metabolic alcohol caused by the lack of relevant genes. To put it simply, these are "manifestations of aldehyde poisoning". Of course, as a good excuse to refuse alcohol, we can use it if we can.
I don't seem to be so easy to get red when I drink it?
Long-term alcohol exposure will allow drinkers to build up tolerance to acetaldehyde toxicity, and note that the toxicity of acetaldehyde to the body remains the same during this transition! It's not that the "amount of alcohol" has been trained, but that the body has given up struggling.
Is it worse to drink and have a white face?
For people who drink alcohol and have a white face, the gene corresponding to ethanol dehydrogenase (ADH) is too weak to pass the first level, and the body can only rely on other mechanisms to process alcohol, but the processing efficiency is limited. Large amounts of alcohol enter the blood circulation, causing peripheral capillaries to constrict and the skin to appear pale. Alcohol can also directly "shut down" the nervous system, so these people quickly get drunk.
People who have not changed their expressions after drinking wine are genetically cleared kings. They have a high efficiency of alcohol metabolism, and the metabolites are quickly excreted from the body through sweating and "kidneys", so most of them can be drunk.
However, a sip of wine can hurt you. Whether you drink blush, white-faced, or seem to drink a lot, it is better to drink less, and if you can, you will not drink.
This article is reviewed by experts
bibliography
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作者：ZYing
策划：Murphy | 监制：Feidi
Cover image source: Zhan Ku Hailuo
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