Rachael Davis
If you’ve got a boozy evening ahead, there’s some common wisdom that you should lay a decent foundation first. A healthy portion of food before drinking delays how quickly you digest alcohol and also protects your stomach from direct contact with a chugged pint.
Keen to get some first-hand data to back the wisdom, a woman has conducted a couple of at-home tests to compare the difference between drinking on an empty stomach and a full one.
The results were “actually wild”.
Loryn Powell, posting to her Facebook page, broke the experiment down into two parts.
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For part one, she ate a pizza before drinking “four shots of vodka and breathalysing every 30 minutes”. A 25ml shot of vodka equates to 1 unit of alcohol, with the weekly recommended limit being 14 units spread across at least three days.
In part two, she said she would abstain from eating the next day and then drink the same four measures of vodka before a series of breathalyser tests.
So, how did she fare?
The thick-crusted pizza and a quadrumvirate of vodka shots made her feel like she was “on spring break” again, and the breathalyser tests found she had a 0.046% blood-alcohol content after the first half hour. For reference, the blood-alcohol limit for driving in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is 0.08%, and it’s 0.05% in Scotland.
"That's very high," she said.
On the hour, the breathalyser recorded a blood-alcohol volume of 0.044%.
After 90 minutes, the figure had dropped to 0.036%, and after two hours it was down to 0.024%. After three hours it was down to 0.015%, and on the fourth hour it was back to 0%.
"You'd think four shots of vodka would get me to 0.08%," she said. "And the fact that I didn't even get past 0.05%... is that like the power of pizza?"
Day two yielded some very different results, as you might have guessed.
On an empty stomach, the four shots hit her for 0.046% after the first half hour, matching the level she reached on a full stomach.
After 60 minutes, it had leapt to 0.084%, breaching the drink driving limit across the UK and every state in the US.
"The pizza saved me from getting a 0.08 percent," said Powell. Pizza, she said, is a “super hero”.
"Okay, the first 30 minutes doesn't matter if you have food in your stomach or not,” she said. “It's what happens after. Woo!"
After 90 minutes she found her blood-alcohol content had continued to rise to 0.089%, more than double the 0.036% she reached at the same point on day one. Half an hour later and they had begun to drop – 0.088% – with hour three yielding a 0.075% reading. Hour four gave up a 0.056% reading, and by the fifth hour she was down to 0.044%.
It took eight hours to drop back to 0%. The pizza had therefore halved the time it took for her blood to drop to full sobriety compared with drinking on an empty stomach.
So there you have it: you haven’t just imagined that drinking on an empty stomach will make you more drunk for longer.