Author: John Carter
What Is Alcohol and What Does It Do to the Human Body? HowStuffWorks
The medulla, or brain stem, controls or influences all of the bodily functions that are involuntary, like breathing, heart rate, temperature and consciousness. As alcohol starts to influence upper centers in the medulla, such as the reticular formation, a person will start to feel sleepy and may eventually become unconscious as BAC increases. If the BAC gets high enough to influence the breathing, heart rate and temperature centers, a person will breathe slowly or stop breathing altogether, and both blood pressure and body temperature will fall. The first example below has a longest chain of six carbon atoms, so the root name is hexanol. The ―OH group is on the third carbon atom, which is indicated by the name 3-hexanol.
In this article, we will examine all of the ways in which alcohol affects the human body. If you have ever seen a person who has had too much to drink, you know that alcohol is a drug that has widespread effects on the body, and those vary from person to person. People who drink might be the “life of the party” or they might become sad and weepy. It all depends on the amount of alcohol consumed, a person’s history with alcohol and a person’s personality. When describing a chemical structure, the terms ‘bond’, ‘bound’ and ‘binding’ are used to discuss how atoms and molecules interact with each other.
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Lacking the means to preserve fruit and other natural products in season, people likely used fermentation as a way to increase the shelf life of food and drink. Despite the popularity of alcoholic beverages the world over, their potential dangers play a sinister leitmotif in human history. Wine might gladden the heart, according to biblical psalmists, but it could also sting like an adder. The great Chinese Shang emperors of the late second millennium B.C.E. are said to have succumbed to too much drink, going crazy and committing suicide.
Alcohols, including ethanol, are not unique to our species’ creations—or even to our planet. Billions of liters of alcohols compose massive clouds in the star-forming regions at the center of our Milky Way. Moreover, some of the earliest single-celled life-forms on Earth most likely nourished themselves by anaerobic fermentation, or glycolysis. The process leads to the excretion of ethanol and carbon dioxide, similar to the way that natural fermented beverages are made today.
Alcohol and Other Bodily Functions
Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers. OpenLearn works with other organisations by providing free courses and resources that support our mission of opening up educational opportunities to more people in more places. Anyone can learn for free on OpenLearn, but signing-up will give you access to your personal learning profile and record of achievements that you earn while you study. Alcohol also affects the regulation of body fluids, causing people to urinate more and become dehydrated.
In addition to coordinating voluntary muscle movements, the cerebellum also coordinates the fine muscle movements involved in maintaining your balance. So, as alcohol affects the cerebellum, a person may lose their balance frequently. In the United States, you must be 21 years or older to buy alcoholic beverages, and there are penalties for serving or selling alcoholic beverages to minors. The common name of an alcohol combines the name of the alkyl group with the word alcohol. If the alkyl group is complex, the common name becomes awkward and the IUPAC name should be used. Common names often incorporate obsolete terms in the naming of the alkyl group; for example, amyl is frequently used instead of pentyl for a five-carbon chain.
The body responds to alcohol in stages, which correspond to an increase in blood alcohol concentration. When you compare men and women of the same height, weight, and build, men tend to have more muscle and less fat than women. Because muscle tissue has more water than fat tissue, a given dose or amount of alcohol will be diluted more in a man than in a woman.
The UK’s official guidance changed in 2016 to say that both men and women should drink no more than 14 units of alcohol a week, equivalent to about six pints of average-strength beer or 10 small glasses of low-strength wine. Some studies have claimed that having one or two drinks a day is linked to better health than avoiding alcohol completely. However, it is hard to unpick correlation and causation in these studies, and the putative benefits of moderate drinking remain controversial.
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- They are used as sweeteners and in making perfumes, are valuable intermediates in the synthesis of other compounds, and are among the most abundantly produced organic chemicals in industry.
- Wine might gladden the heart, according to biblical psalmists, but it could also sting like an adder.
- An electrical signal travels down one nerve cell, causing it to release the neurotransmitter into a small gap between cells called the synapse.
- Alcohols of low molecular weight are highly soluble in water; with increasing molecular weight, they become less soluble in water, and their boiling points, vapour pressures, densities, and viscosities increase.
Alcohol affects various centers in the brain, both higher and lower order. The centers are not equally affected by the same BAC — the higher-order centers are more sensitive than the lower-order centers. Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at /us).
More on Alcohol
Therefore, the blood alcohol concentration resulting from that dose will be higher in a woman than in a man, and the woman will feel the effects of alcohol sooner than the man will. The articles here highlight the modern versions of drinks with very ancient pedigrees, including grape wine and barley and wheat beers. As a reminder to the reader that science does not stand still, recent findings have shown that, contrary to an article included in this volume, absinthe does not pose a particularly potent health threat. Its production in the U.S. has again been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Thus was ushered in humankind’s first biotechnology, based on empirical observation—with the help of a microscopic organism, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae (still used in modern fermented-beverage making).
What Is Alcohol and What Does It Do to the Human Body?
Nearly every aspect of life, from birth to death—everyday meals, rites of passage and major religious festivals—revolve around one or more of these alcoholic beverages. Similarly, grape wine is central to Western religions, rice and millet beers held court in ancient China, and a fermented cacao beverage was the beverage of the elite in pre-Colombian Americas. In the long term, high levels of alcohol consumption can cause health problems and increase the risk of many diseases, including several types of cancer, dementia, heart and liver disease as well as affecting mental health.
How Alcohol Enters the Body
This article covers the structure and classification, physical properties, commercial importance, sources, and reactions of alcohols. For more information about closely related compounds, see chemical compound, phenol, and ether. The ‘alcohol’ that is referred to in drinks is one of this family of similar chemicals containing an –OH group, and the particular one that is present in alcoholic drinks has the chemical name ethanol.
Alcohol also impairs memory, so people may struggle to remember what happened while they were drunk. Alcohol has two noticeable effects on the hypothalamus and pituitary gland, which influence sexual behavior and urinary excretion. Nerve cells talk to each other and to other cells (such as muscle or gland cells) by sending chemical messages. An electrical signal travels down one nerve cell, causing it to release the neurotransmitter into a small gap between cells called the synapse. The neurotransmitter travels across the gap, binds to a protein on the receiving cell membrane called a receptor, and causes a change (electrical, chemical or mechanical) in the receiving cell. The neurotransmitter and receptor are specific to each other, like a lock and key.