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Comment by smcgivern | Hacker News Reader

That's not the point of the article. It's saying that because of the rate your body processes alcohol, seemingly small differences in ABV can leave much more unprocessed alcohol in your body than you'd expect.

Are you saying that the answer to the question in the article was obvious to you?

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How is this not obvious?

Your body processes alcohol at a certain rate. Anything over that adds to the backlog. If you consume alcohol faster than your body can process it, you're not going to be sober any time soon.

Whether it's high alcohol beers or low alcohol "hard" drinks doesn't matter to your body. The only thing that matters is the amount of alcohol you are consuming.

It's not obvious because it's unlike any other commonly used recreational drug. Alcohol at typical dose has zero-order pharmacokinetics, unlike most other drugs which have a half-life. This can result in surprising differences in intoxication with only small differences in intake per unit time, as the article explains.

I think the point is that the difference between a 4% and 5% beer is much more than perceived. That "1%" extra might not seem like its a big deal to people ready to sit down and have a few beers but it adds up by quite a lot. This article is meant for people that don't fully understand how the body deals with alcohol that it can't process.

Its actually 25% more, right? Its not the beer (water) quantity that's significant, its total alcohol consumed.

If you read the article, you will find the author's answer to this question!

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