Alcohol...Social Activity or Evolutionary Process?
On today's addition of Darwin, Freud, and the Pope Walk Into a Bar..We'll be discussing the mechanisms involved in the breakdown of alcohol and how some ethnic groups have inherited a deficiency in the enzyme involved in that breakdown. Sometimes when you're drinking alcohol your face will go red...and lucky for you you're not alone. More than one in three people with Easy Asian heritage (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) experience facial flushing when drinking beer, wine or spirits. In Asian populations, it is due to an inherited deficiency in one of the enzymes involved in the breakdown of alcohol: aldehyde dehydrogenase. This type of reaction is very rare, but not unknown, in other ethnic groups. So first things first is how do you exactly digest alcohol? Alcohol is broken down in your liver in two steps. In the first step, the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) converts alcohol into a rath...