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Congrats on your sobriety!
If someone is really lucky they can develop alcohol intolerance like I did. It's a medical condition. I used to enjoy the occasional beer, red wine, bourbon, sake, whatever. I really liked them. Not to excess, except occasionally when out with friends. But it crept up on me slowly— at first the next day became harder and harder, and soon it was later that night, then within hours of having a drink or two, then while I was drinking the first glass... I thought I was just getting old, but it just kept getting worse.
Those "non-alcoholic" beers taste great these days, but they still have <0.5% alcohol. The last time I had a single NA pale ale I had a headache, brain fog, and lethargy for over 24 hours. God help me if I were to have even a lower % IPA now... I haven't tried it in years, but last time I had mild nausea and other hangover symptoms halfway through sipping it. Water, drinking extremely slowly, etc. doesn't help. My body just can't metabolize alcohol anymore.
Of course I don't feel compelled to drink in the same way an alcoholic does, but I do empathize in my own small way with their plight when going out. I want to join in, but I stick to water instead, knowing that a drink would completely wreck me and I'd regret it for days.
This is entirely unrelated to cancer, but I just thought I'd share. Maybe someone is experiencing similar symptoms but doesn't know it has a name.
Is this a known medical condition, alcohol intolerance?
I know enzymes in the body break down and remove it, and certain people genetically have more or less depending.
Cultures that have been drinking for thousands of years have more of the enzymes, those that just started have way less like the natives in america and I think australia but idk on that. Basically the entire old world has more of the alcohol metabolizing enzymes from eurasia to africa. Not sure of inuits and far northern tribes but if they milked animals in prehistory they probably fermented milk for kefir.
Also women metabolize alcohol less than men due to these enzymes.
So the same amount of alcohol can have wildly more or less pronounced inebriation even before taking tolerance into account.
Yes, it's real. Here's a good overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_intolerance
That is interesting thanks. As an aside an herbal I was doing for a while, Devil's Club, also known as Alaskan wild ginseng, opplopanax horridum, that I harvested for a bit, is a very powerful medicine in a great many ways.
Some of the earlier Russian scientists that were looking at it back when they had Alaska, wrote that they found that it seemed to inhibit the removal of alcohol from your body.
I have the opposite problem. I have the mutation that allows my body to crank out massive quantities of acetaldehyde dehydrogenase. So back in the day, I could drink like a fish and almost never suffer a hangover. While this might be convenient in the short term, it greatly increases the risk of alcoholism, since it disables the main feedback mechanism telling you that you're harming yourself.
Luckily, my mother gave me a chat about our family history (lots of early deaths from alcoholism and alcohol-related suicide and misadventure) and I had recently had some disturbing close-call experiences of my own while drunk, so I quit in my mid-20s. I don't abstain completely, but haven't had more than a couple of pints in a day since. It's been 40 years. For long periods, I had no alcohol at all. I get it that some people can't cut back without abstaining completely, and can't quit without support, but I was fortunate in being able to. If you're trying to quit, do whatever works for you. Not everybody's the same and there's no shame in getting help.
Incidentally, cirrhosis is just as shitty a way to leave this world as cancer is, so the cancer news is a drag, but other factors already motivated my behavior change.
I previously quit for a decade almost completely, drinking like you a couple here and there, by restarting running distance, also using kratom to help get started until the endorphins take over.
Physical exertion and alcohol do not go well together, I wanted to go running not drink.
I restarted drinking homebrew by choice just last year. Working on maple wines and other herb infused drinks, with syrup I make, until I start malting barley and growing hops to make ipa. But I do not get falling down drunk and am happy regardless but I choose to get buzzed lately if at home, I may mostly transition to traditional herbals soon though.
I share your "gift". No matter how much or how many days I drank, next morning the only symptom was tiredness. My partying never really got out hand, but I just kind of lost interest in it after my studies.
My both granddads died of alcohol-related causes before my birth, so the danger was very real. Without the fear of hangover it would have been so easy to just keep on going. Luckily I never felt any pull towards it.
I got my first real hangover when I was closer to 30 and it was a mindblowingly horrible experience. Nowadays I get drunk maybe once or twice a year and I do enjoy a craft beer or two on weekends, but that's it.
That <0.5%, if I understand it correctly, is basically nothing. A cursory search showed that there are a lot of food and drinks that are at around that level. A ripe banana can have 0.4% by itself!
Sure. It's possible it's in a different form in food versus e.g. beer. I can eat all of those foods without a problem. I can't drink any of those things I listed anymore.
No, it's exactly the same form, ethanol. It's just a matter of how much there is. You probably have a threshold, and 0.5% is below it.
Thanks. In that case I suspect many (not all) NA beers must exceed that threshold despite their labeling. That would match my experience, since a handful are OK and some consistently produce symptoms. It's even within the same manufacturer, as certain varieties have an effect and others don't. I love beer, but I've given up on all of them, because it's just not worth the hassle and taking the chance.
The beers may also have low levels of fusel alcohols, which would not be counted, in addition to the residual ethanol