It's weird how discussion of alcoholism in Asia rarely ever mentions the biological component. Ethanol gives you the good feelings associated with drinking (an

It's weird how discussion of alcoholism in Asia rarely ever mentions the biological component. Ethanol gives you the good feelings associated with drinking (and the incapacitation) and it gets metabolized into acetaldehyde, which gives you the symptoms of hangover (flushed face, headache, vomiting, etc.). Asian populations have a much higher prevalence of variants of two genes that encode for proteins that turn ethanol into acetaldehyde and acetaldehyde into harmless subcomponents. The variants are much better at metabolizing ethanol (20x faster) and completely inactive at metabolizing acetaldehyde. Almost all Japanese (>95%) have at least one copy of a "metabolize ethanol faster" gene, and somewhere around half have inactive aldehyde metabolism, so given the same amount of alcohol, they would be far less incapacitated than a European (and red, and puking). The net result is a society that looks like it has a massive alcoholism problem to the west, that isn't quite as bad as it looks.