Alcohol’s Attraction
Alcohol has been around since Man first discovered fermentation in rotting fruit thousands of years ago and the ancient Sumerians became the first brewers in around 4000 BC. It is a mind-altering drug that affects our mood. We use it to celebrate, commiserate, to boost our confidence, to wind down.
We use it to overcome self-consciousness, give us ‘Dutch courage’ and help us loosen up in social gatherings. Sometimes we use it to ‘drown our sorrows’. In moderation, alcohol can, temporarily, make us feel better about ourselves but it is actually a depressant drug.
More than three or four units of alcohol can begin to adversely affect our mood and can make us feel worse. Then our brain tells us to have another one to buck us up again. The trouble is, even after just a couple of drinks, alcohol affects our judgement.
When we are feeling down, perhaps after a bereavement, relationship breakdown, disappointment, or if we are in physical pain, we might turn to alcohol for comfort. Most of us have done it but we soon find there’s no solution in the bottom of an empty glass.
There is a genetic factor to alcoholism. Autopsies on male alcoholics’ brains show the presence of a chemical not found in non-alcoholic males. Most of the time, sons of alcoholics become alcoholics and daughters of alcoholics marry alcoholics. If alcohol and water offered to a group of animals approximately, half of the group will drink water and other half of the group will drink alcohol.
It is proved that whether we like or do not like alcohol depends on our genetics. Children of alcoholics who are adopted by healthy parents more likely become alcoholics than their own children. Scientists wanted to know how animals that drink alcohol are different from animals that drink water. In one group of experiments alcohol was injected to both types of animals.
After injection of alcohol animals are falling asleep. Animals that like to drink alcohol sleep much less than animals that do not like to drink. It means that metabolism of alcohol is much faster in animals that like to drink than in animal that don’t. It was shown that animals that like to drink alcohol and have short sleep after injection of alcohol have more active enzymes than animals that do not like to drink alcohol and sleep long time after alcohol injection.
Since activity of enzymes is higher in those animals, their level of endogenous alcohol or alcohol that is produced inside their body is lower than level of endogenous alcohol in animals that do not like to drink. If animals have lover than “normal” level of alcohol they drink it to restore alcohol to normal level in the same way as we eat fruits when our sugar level is low. For animals that drinking behavior is normal and rats do not become alcoholics. For human being there is a catch. When human being raises his/her blood alcohol to “normal” level, he/she does not stop drinking because alcohol activates brain rewarding system.
A person, who has low enzyme activity while drinking alcohol very soon starts to feel bad because his enzymes will not oxidize alcohol and acet-aldehid fast enough.
Photo by delphaber
