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Alcohol Ethanol Harms the Human Body, Blocks Pain & Causes Euphoria + Hangover

When you drink alcoholic beverages the alcohol moves throughout the entire body within minutes. You can smell alcohol on someone who has been drinking because it is evaporating out of their skin where it has a metallic floral aroma, scent or smell. 

Because of how ethanol affects the brain, it slows their motor control, so their walking gate is different, the way they are able to control a bicycle, wood chipper, chainsaw or other heavy equipment is degraded, such that their have less control or slower control, making operating anything under the influence of alcohol dangerous & risky. 

It damages membranes throughout the mouth, tongue, throat, stomach, upper intestine, lower intestine, colon, sphincter, liver, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, nails, and causes the brain to turn off in a progressive dose dependent way such that as you drink more the ethanol spreads out through your entire body and brain, and the only cure for a hangover from the dehydration it causes is more water and time. 

Time is the cure for a hangover. 

Drink plenty of water and electrolytes and take a multi-b vitamin the next day, as these combined with time can help to restore you after a night heavy of drinking.

I Still Drink Ethanol Containing Beverages Sparingly

I largely gave up consuming alcoholic beverages for health reasons because it reacts poorly with the metformin that I take for diabetes. Ethanol ok in small amounts, even the human guts makes ethanol with some of the carbohydrates we eat. We are talking about the same amount of ethanol in a typical bottle of raw kombucha, or half a serving of beer or half a serving of wine. A small amount of alcohol infrequently perfectly fine, but be careful and less is better.

Ethanol diffuses all through your body and ends up running through you blood stream where it gets pumped into your lungs and evaporates into your breath. As you breathe out some of that ethanol mixes with the air your expelled from your lungs into a BAC or blood alcohol calculator meter where it causes a reaction in an ethanol fuel cell in the BAC meter producing voltage that is then multiplied using a formula to create the BAC or blood alcohol content score where the legal limit for adult drivers in the USA 0.08% or 0.02 for school bus drivers or EMTs or other safety critical commercial truck drivers driving hazardous materials for example. 

Women have less water in their body so alcohol affects women more than men. Children also have less water in their body so alcohol affects younger children much more than adults. Alcohol a poison like sugar at elevated doses or larger servings and becomes increasingly toxic as you keep drinking.

Ethanol Used as Anesthesia in Medicine Originally 

People are drinking because the ethanol makes their body feel euphoria at first, numb to pain, inhibited thinking, and stress response that makes them want to move or fight or flight response, see aggressive behavior while drunk to understand what I am talking about. People have been drinking beer and wine for thousands of years, but only very recently have we gained the physical science medical physiological biochemical knowledge to underhand what ethanol doing inside the body. 

~Activates GABA receptors slowing down brain cells

~Increases blood cortisol levels, histamine levels, and blocks melatonin, one of the reasons drinking too much causes choppy sleep. 

~Partially activates Mu-opioid receptors & calcium channels, blocking pain transmission, making people feel good

~Increases dopamine, serotonin, epinephrin, norepinephrine levels in the the brain, causing euphoria like other recreational drugs like, amphetamine, methamphetamine, MDMA or Cocaine or LSD. 

~Increases urine discharge, sucking water out of the blood, one the reasons the it causes handover

~Interacts with dehydrogenase enzyme in the liver, becoming the cancer causing acetaldehyde on its way to becoming acetic acid or vinegar for excreting in the urine, which you will notice because drink alcoholic beverages in excess makes consumes of such have to pee a lot more. 

Drunk Driving Dangers

Many drunken drivers causes bad car accidents that kill the driver or other people on or near roadways, in other vehicles, usually the drunken drivers fault since their intoxication from drinking alcohol worsened their ability to safely control the automobile under the drunk drivers control. 

In this way alcohol responsible for many deadly car accidents and accidents that paralyze, maim, hurt, disable, disfigure or damage other peoples bodies severely, usually because the vehicle operated by the drunk driver made of steel alloys, with a mass or weight of around 3000 lbs, driving faster than the posted speed limit, going around corners at unsafe speeds that cause the tires to loose traction with the road, causing the vehicle to skid or driver to lose control in a way that precipitated the resulting accident damaging other peoples property or persons, not limited to fatal damage to people and costly damage to parked cars, homes and other private property, public buildings, infrastructure like bridges, elevated walkways, power poles, signs and other assets. 

Beer & Wine Before Industrialization when Everyone Walked

Going back to early human history when alcoholic beverages started becoming popular, this was largely before the Age of Enlightenment and subsequent industrial revolutions that gave rise to billions of automobiles driven daily, made of heavy metal boxes that can easily harm, hurt or kill people or animals struck by vehicles under the control of a drunk driver making poor choices because of how the ethanol slowed down their brain functions.

When people drank alcohol in antiquity, they got buzzed or drunk, but the only popular way of getting around was on foot, walking, which helped them burn off the alcohol. Engaging in physical activity increases metabolic rate or the clearance rate of ethanol from the human body. 

Elevated breathing rate for example, which happen when physical exercise movement or activities happen, helps pump by evaporation more blood alcohol out of the lungs into expelled breath, since we breathe out ethanol vapors since ethanol ends up in the blood stream pumped into the lung where small sacs have high surface area such that vapor pressure of ethanol at body temperature sufficiently warm enough to boil the ethanol into out outgoing air as we breathe out, the same way that a BAC meter can take the expelled air from our lungs containing ethanol to create an estimate of the blood alcohol content or BAC. 

Alcohol Less Strong in Antiquity & Water Was Dangerous to Consume 

Back when drinking water was dangerous because of water born illness, most people in the Middle Ages drank weak beer all day, or wine. The process of making beer and wine sanitizes the resulting beverage of dangerous pathogenic microbes or bad bacteria.

Beer was 3% alcohol back then, and wine was 7% alcohol, unlike some typical better today that is 5-9% alcohol and modern wine thats 9-17% alcohol, and we are not even touching on concentrated spirits that can be 25-90% ethanol or alcohol, such that a few 25ml shots of spirits enough to get most people very buzzed or drunken. 

Old Beer & Wine Gave Way to Coffee & Tea

Hot coffee & tea alternative made industrial revolutions more productive as people switched away from drinking ethanol containing beer and wine to hot coffee & hot tea which also killed off dangerous microbes because of how both are produced. Thus caffeine and many other new substances entered the human food chain that promoted wakefulness, ideal for rapid industrial development in the areas of the world where coffee flourished. By this standard we would think that Italy would be the world's most industrialized country, but this is far from the actual reality of the modern Italian economy or government. Today many caffeine free tea's are also popular. 

Times Have Changed 

Many people today do not smoke cigarettes or use tobacco products, are more health conscious, do not drink alcoholic beverages, exercise regularly, and try to stay mentally, morally & physically fit.  

Clean Filtered Water Today

The most popular & healthiest beverage of them all, what animals in nature drink, water :) Water filtered or clean water trending as the most popular beverage today, many people even carry water bottles to make sure to stay well hydrated by drinking enough water, which the water bottle helps the to do by acting as a reminder to drink enough water. In the chip making sector ultra high purity water used to rinse the wafers made into chips during several hundred stages of chemical processing, where water of the highest purity used as a solvent to rinse away acids, bases & other chemicals during the chip making process sequence. 

Streams of Chemicals Entering Your Body

What you eat or drink forms the largest stream of chemicals entering your body. What you put into your body affects your health & wellness, proven by tiny amounts of substances like LSD which in microgram quantities can causes 16 of profound changes in mental experience & executive function of the brain, in what is known as tripping out or having a psychedelic experience. 

In a similar way some very toxic substances, some pollutants, and some industrial waste chemicals emissions are poisonous to the human body with toxic effects even when exposure levels are in tiny amounts, such that even tiny amounts of these toxic poisons can causes diseases or sickness or degrade the health and wellness of the human body in what we study as a field called Toxicology to understand how some elements, chemicals and substances harm the human body, what these things do inside the body that causes harm. 

Lead or Pb metal for example is toxic because it binds and deactivates enzymes essential to cell function, thus lead kills brain cells and the main reason that TEL or tetraethyl lead removed from gasoline, since virtually all modern gasoline sold as a unleaded today worldwide. This is also why air pollution so harmful to public health, because it exposes people to toxic substance in their air we are all breathing.

Coal power emissions for example contain mercury, lead, arsenic, uranium, thorium and worse heavy toxic and radiative metals and oxides thereof, plus particles, smoke, soot, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen or NOX, and oxides of sulfur SOX that form acid rain when they mix with water in the atmosphere, which is toxic to aquatic wildlife in oceans, lakes, rivers and streams, such that air pollution from coal power caused damage to the fishing industry. 

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