If drinking enough water was tricky, this was like chewing cement. Prof Nutt tells me that food “will slow down the alcohol being absorbed. But we have to remember the two factors in opposition here. You’ve got the alcohol going into the stomach and through the stomach and getting you drunk. And then you’ve got the liver clearing the alcohol. So the rising phase and the clearing phase are in opposition.”
Should you drink coffee if you are drunk?
Yet another pub tale is that coffee can sober you up. I tried it, with two flat whites.
It can, in theory, make you more alert. But it can’t sober you up. “Coffee is an alerting agent,” explains Prof Nutt. “So it definitely offsets the sedation and intoxication.”
The last resort: Does vomiting make you sober?
Prof Nutt explains that when we vomit after drinking it’s because of ‘gastric stasis’ – essentially the volume of alcohol poisoning the nerves in the stomach.
“There are cells called mast cells in the lining of your stomach and your intestines,” he explains. “When they get poisoned, they break down and release serotonin – a neurotransmitter and hormone that causes you to be sick when released in the stomach. There’s a sort of a paradoxical, fortuitous, accidental phenomenon of vomiting with alcohol that actually stops you dying of alcohol poisoning the brain because the stomach kicks it out first.”
The impact that vomiting had on my alcohol reading was interesting. There was an immediate drop-off in my alcohol but then the levels of alcohol in my system spiked again. Long-term, it had no impact whatsoever. Prof Nutt believes my vomiting episode did two things. “You threw up and that’s where you see the alcohol level drop. But some alcohol still made it to your intestine and was immediately absorbed into the small bowel. That’s when you see your alcohol levels go back up with a vengeance over the next few hours.”