5 ms·

All the Airforce personnel that I've drunk with tell me that a couple minutes on pure oxygen do wonders to clear up a hangover.

cafard 7y ago
Pure oxygen may clear up a hangover, but as far as I know the body metabolizes alcohol at a fixed rate unaffected by oxygen, exercise, etc.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Seems reasonable that oxygen should affect metabolic rates.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Not enough to sober up in a matter of minutes. It may wake you up a bit, you're still impaired relative to where you'd have been without the alcohol in your system (or lack of sleep or whatever other impairment is present).
    - vonseel 7y ago
      Go-pills certainly increase tolerance to alcohol, won’t change your BAC but you’ll be less impaired after drinking, although it still isn’t safe and shouldn’t be an excuse for flying after drinking. This article is more about the opposite, though, sounds like the marines had some ambien left in their systems, and possibly motion sickness pills (Dramamine/Benadryl?), but they claim the levels were so low it shouldn’t have affected the pilots. Overall I think the guy above boiled it down pretty well, some mistakes were made, but these marines were not prepared with enough training or properly functioning equipment to do the job safely, and senior commander’s are just pointing the blame at the squadron and middle management instead of taking ownership of the real problem (not responding to warnings about unpreparedness).
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    Why? We give oxygen to injured people because their lungs are impaired. But you can’t force more oxygen into the blood than it can carry, it just doesn’t work like that.
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      Our blood rarely carries all the oxygen it can. If its suddenly saturated, that means more oxygen throughout the body for metabolic purposes.
      - arkades 7y ago
        Uh, incorrect. Resting o2 sat is 99% in most young healthy people - like aviators. In older people, or the unhealthy, you may see it start to drop due to diffusion or ventilation defects - but barring serious lung disease, neuromuscular defects, severe, severe obesity, etc. that still gives you a resting sat in the mid 90s. There is also oxygen dissolved directly in blood rather than saturating hemoglobin, but that constitutes a tiny fraction of o2 in comparison. Please don’t make shit up.
        JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        So, breathing hard when exercising isn't a thing? Don't need more oxygen then vs resting? How can that all work?
        lb1lf 7y ago
        -Oh, breathing hard when exercising is a thing, noone claimed otherwise. Your body requires more oxygen. You breathe harder. Heart rate increases to bring that oxygen to your muscles. That still does not oversaturate your blood with oxygen, though - only maintains saturation as consumption increases.
        arkades 7y ago
        Bingo.
  - gus_massa 7y ago
    No, but the answer is too technical https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484320/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484320/ . Wikipedia is not very clear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_metabolism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_metabolism Short version of the paper (hopefully accurate enough): The alcohol in the body is "burned" in a chain of multiple reactions. Using multiple steps because you can store the energy extracted in each step and store it in ATP or NADH to use it later in other reactions. The first step is to extract two Hydrogen from the alcohol CH3-CH2-OH --> CH3-CH=O. This step needs an enzyme. There is not too much of this enzyme, so a small amount of alcohol saturates the maximum conversion capacity (that is ~7g/h). All the other steps have a better conversion rate, so this is the important step for alcohol metabolism. Note that this step doesn't use oxygen. Oxygen is use in the step four and later. (I'm not sure if I'm counting all the steps correctly, but the use of oxygen is much later.)
- arkades 7y ago
  This is correct. And it is alcohol’s direct action in the brain that causes impairment.
- massaman_yams 7y ago
  One thing known to speed alcohol metabolization is fructose. That's not to say consuming fructose will make you "sober", though, as the first metabolic byproduct of alcohol - acetaldehyde - also has CNS effects. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1854373 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1854373
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  Drunkenness is mediated by alcohol dehydrogenase. Hangover is mediated by acetaldehyde dehydrogenase. As both of those use NAD+ as cofactors, something that may sober someone up faster without causing hangover symptoms is a combination of tryptophan and niacin, but only to the extent that NAD+ availability is a limiting factor in the liver. A dietary sufficiency of zinc is necessary for production of alcohol dehydrogenase. Experiments suggest that 1 g fructose/kg body mass also helps process alcohol faster, but I'm not clear on how, and the research has inconsistent reproducibility. If you have a healthy diet already, and have a healthy liver, there is very little you can actually do to sober up faster, beyond building up a tolerance, which increases the amount of alcohol dehydrogenase your body produces when exposed to ethanol. The pure oxygen may counteract some of the symptoms of drunkenness and hangover, but the health effects of hyperoxia can be even worse than ethanol intoxication. It would be less dangerous to intravenously infuse tryptophan and niacin-associated nicotinamides, or use direct hepatic injection, and even that sounds reckless.

cafard 7y ago

Pure oxygen may clear up a hangover, but as far as I know the body metabolizes alcohol at a fixed rate unaffected by oxygen, exercise, etc.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Seems reasonable that oxygen should affect metabolic rates.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Not enough to sober up in a matter of minutes. It may wake you up a bit, you're still impaired relative to where you'd have been without the alcohol in your system (or lack of sleep or whatever other impairment is present).
  - vonseel 7y ago
    Go-pills certainly increase tolerance to alcohol, won’t change your BAC but you’ll be less impaired after drinking, although it still isn’t safe and shouldn’t be an excuse for flying after drinking. This article is more about the opposite, though, sounds like the marines had some ambien left in their systems, and possibly motion sickness pills (Dramamine/Benadryl?), but they claim the levels were so low it shouldn’t have affected the pilots. Overall I think the guy above boiled it down pretty well, some mistakes were made, but these marines were not prepared with enough training or properly functioning equipment to do the job safely, and senior commander’s are just pointing the blame at the squadron and middle management instead of taking ownership of the real problem (not responding to warnings about unpreparedness).
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Why? We give oxygen to injured people because their lungs are impaired. But you can’t force more oxygen into the blood than it can carry, it just doesn’t work like that.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Our blood rarely carries all the oxygen it can. If its suddenly saturated, that means more oxygen throughout the body for metabolic purposes.
    - arkades 7y ago
      Uh, incorrect. Resting o2 sat is 99% in most young healthy people - like aviators. In older people, or the unhealthy, you may see it start to drop due to diffusion or ventilation defects - but barring serious lung disease, neuromuscular defects, severe, severe obesity, etc. that still gives you a resting sat in the mid 90s. There is also oxygen dissolved directly in blood rather than saturating hemoglobin, but that constitutes a tiny fraction of o2 in comparison. Please don’t make shit up.
      - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        So, breathing hard when exercising isn't a thing? Don't need more oxygen then vs resting? How can that all work?
        lb1lf 7y ago
        -Oh, breathing hard when exercising is a thing, noone claimed otherwise. Your body requires more oxygen. You breathe harder. Heart rate increases to bring that oxygen to your muscles. That still does not oversaturate your blood with oxygen, though - only maintains saturation as consumption increases.
        arkades 7y ago
        Bingo.
- gus_massa 7y ago
  No, but the answer is too technical https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484320/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3484320/ . Wikipedia is not very clear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_metabolism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_metabolism Short version of the paper (hopefully accurate enough): The alcohol in the body is "burned" in a chain of multiple reactions. Using multiple steps because you can store the energy extracted in each step and store it in ATP or NADH to use it later in other reactions. The first step is to extract two Hydrogen from the alcohol CH3-CH2-OH --> CH3-CH=O. This step needs an enzyme. There is not too much of this enzyme, so a small amount of alcohol saturates the maximum conversion capacity (that is ~7g/h). All the other steps have a better conversion rate, so this is the important step for alcohol metabolism. Note that this step doesn't use oxygen. Oxygen is use in the step four and later. (I'm not sure if I'm counting all the steps correctly, but the use of oxygen is much later.)
arkades 7y ago
This is correct. And it is alcohol’s direct action in the brain that causes impairment.
massaman_yams 7y ago
One thing known to speed alcohol metabolization is fructose. That's not to say consuming fructose will make you "sober", though, as the first metabolic byproduct of alcohol - acetaldehyde - also has CNS effects. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1854373 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1854373
logfromblammo 7y ago
Drunkenness is mediated by alcohol dehydrogenase. Hangover is mediated by acetaldehyde dehydrogenase. As both of those use NAD+ as cofactors, something that may sober someone up faster without causing hangover symptoms is a combination of tryptophan and niacin, but only to the extent that NAD+ availability is a limiting factor in the liver. A dietary sufficiency of zinc is necessary for production of alcohol dehydrogenase. Experiments suggest that 1 g fructose/kg body mass also helps process alcohol faster, but I'm not clear on how, and the research has inconsistent reproducibility. If you have a healthy diet already, and have a healthy liver, there is very little you can actually do to sober up faster, beyond building up a tolerance, which increases the amount of alcohol dehydrogenase your body produces when exposed to ethanol. The pure oxygen may counteract some of the symptoms of drunkenness and hangover, but the health effects of hyperoxia can be even worse than ethanol intoxication. It would be less dangerous to intravenously infuse tryptophan and niacin-associated nicotinamides, or use direct hepatic injection, and even that sounds reckless.