Get drunk quicker with artificially-sweetened mixed drinks
Ok... the subject is a bit of a stretch. It jumps to a conclusion from a limited amount of information. Let's take a look at the study.
The researchers studied eight healthy young men on two different days. Each day, the men were served vodka mixed with an orange-flavored drink.On one day, the drink was made with a “regular” mix containing sugar (sucrose). On the other day, the drink was made with “diet” mix.
The men fasted before each session. The drinks were the equivalent of three standard alcoholic beverages, Rayner told reporters in a teleconference.
The key questions:
* How quickly did the drink empty from the men’s stomachs
* How did the men’s blood alcohol concentration change 180 minutes after downing the drinks.The results:
* The artificially sweetened drink was quicker to leave the men’s stomachs (21 minutes, compared with 36 with the sugar drink to empty half of the drink from the stomach).
* The men had a higher peak blood alcohol concentration after drinking the artificially sweetened drink (0.05 blood alcohol level, compared with 0.03 with the sugar drink).
* For both groups, blood alcohol levels peaked about 30 minutes after drinking the drinks.
Source
So what's wrong with this?
- limited study size (8 men)
- only men (Is sex a factor?)
- no randomization (Were test results affected by the day? Would the results be different if half of the subjects got product A and the other half product B on day 1, and vice versa on day 2?)
- only one artificial sweeter tested (Would other artificial sweeteners have the same effect?)
- and more... but we'll keep it short and sweet for now (pun intended)
This researchers came to the following conclusions:
(emphasis added)
“Substitution of artificial sweeteners for sucrose in mixed alcoholic beverages may have a marked effect on the rate of gastric emptying and the blood alcohol response,” write the researchers. They included Reawika Chaikomin, PhD, and Chris Rayner, MD, of the Royal Adelaide Hospital in Adelaide, Australia.The magnitude of the effect was “striking,” Rayner told reporters in a teleconference.
“I think it’s something that needs to be borne out both in public education and the labeling of these beverages,” he says. Because in the eyes of many consumers, all they think about is the number of units of alcohol consumed and we want to highlight the idea that the context in which the alcohol is consumed is very important” with regards to intoxication.
Does testing a single sweetener on eight male subjects with no replication or randomization yield results sufficient to justify stating that artificial sweeteners in general affect alcohol absorption and peak alcohol level for the entire population? Is it sufficient evidence to mandate a change in labeling for artificially sweetened alcoholic drinks/mixers?
Be critical of what you read in the news. It's possible that this study's results will be replicated in a larger study that tests many sweeteners, so their general conclusions could be right. But at this time their published data doesn't support making such a general claim.
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