WOMEN who drink beer have a better chance of matching their male drinking
buddies drink for drink, while those who have wine and whisky get drunk more
quickly than the lads, a new study shows.
It鈥檚 no secret that females have higher blood alcohol levels after a few
rounds than men do, even when body weight is taken into account. What puzzled
researchers is that this gender difference disappears when alcohol is
administered intravenously.
To try and explain why, a team led by Charles Lieber, from the Mount Sinai
School of Medicine, New York, measured the activity of three stomach enzymes
known to break down alcohol. Lieber discovered that under certain conditions an
enzyme called c-alcohol dehydrogenase (c-ADH), was nearly twice as effective at
breaking down alcohol in men as in women (Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental
Research, vol 25, p 502).
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Among volunteers who sipped mixtures containing 10 per cent and 40 per cent
alcohol鈥攍evels akin to those found in wine and whisky,
respectively鈥攖he activity of the c-ADH shot up in men but not in women.
However, the c-ADH had little or no activity in male or female subjects who
sipped a solution containing 5 per cent alcohol, like a typical beer.
Although these results suggest that women could hold their own against men
when drinking beer, the researchers don鈥檛 recommend it. Other studies have shown
alcohol has a more severe effect on the liver and other organs in women than in
men, they say.
鈥淭he lesson is, if you have parties, you should have two separate sizes of
glasses, one for women and one for men,鈥� Lieber says. Lower body weight, and a
higher proportion of fat, also make women more susceptible to drink.
鈥淟ieber has found one of the factors that explain the gender difference,鈥�
says Ting-Kai Li, director of the Indiana Alcohol Research Center at Indiana
University in Indianapolis. 鈥淭here could be others.鈥�