The End of Alcohol | Hacker News Reader

The End of Alcohol

wired.com

16 pointsfortran775 comments

I had a friend and colleague die recently of alcoholism and I've commented on that and alcoholism in another HN story a few days ago so I won't repeat those comments here.

Fortunately, I'm not an alcoholic and I do not like the effects of alcohol but I do like the taste of alcoholic drinks.

In recent years there have been many attempts to reduce or remove the alcohol from, say, wine and there are now quite a number of nonalcoholic 'wines' on the market. The trouble is that removing the alcohol also removes the spirity lift that the alcohol provides - thus the 'wine' no longer really tastes like the real thing.

What we need is research into solving this problem. Wine would still be made in the usual way and the alcohol removed as with nonalcoholic 'wines' then the alcohol replaced with a benign alcohol substitute that tastes like alcohol and has its same spirity character.

No doubt this is a huge challenge and it may not even be possible but it seems to me that we need to try.

Taking out the alcohol of say a first class Bordeaux and substituting a benign substitute that has essentially the same characteristics without damaging the wine would, I reckon, be one of the greatest challenges for organic chemists, but if they were successful then it would most likely have a huge and beneficial effect on our drinking culture.

Perhaps a better solution would be to do some actual medical research on reversing the deleterious effects of alcohol on the body? The metabolic pathway for alcohol is known, but I see zero efforts to try to modify it. For decades the medical community has had a very Puritan attitude that such research would only make people drink more and that the resulting social behavior would be worse than the current level of harm. But no one ever actually investigated it, it's been an assumption for all this time. Imagine a real Synthehol like in Star Trek.

"...reversing the deleterious effects of alcohol on the body?"

I've often thought about that myself and it seems an excellent idea but I've not a clue how one would go about it. All I've ever come up with is some hypothetical chemical that one swallows before drinking that either absorbs or neutralizes the alcohol.

Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware no one has done anything of substance in that area.

It seems to me that alcohol is such a reactive chemical in the body and given that the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase is so effective at processing it, it'd be damned hard to find anything that would 'bypass' that process without itself doing some kind of damage.

One approach is to eliminate congeners, the stuff that adds the flavor to alcohol but is also strongly related to kerosene. There have been hangover pills that actually do seem to work to some extent, RU-21 and Chaser, both no longer sold I think. I've tried both. RU-21 is weird, I can't describe it, I didn't like it, it made everything taste sweet. Chaser did seem to reduce hangovers but also made the mind clearer while drinking, which reduced the fun somewhat, which tended to make people drink more. Not sure why they were taken off the market, I've never been able to find an explanation. Activated carbon pills are also used by some people to reduce hangovers, which I think absorbs some of the congeners.

I think the main problem is the breakdown of alcohol into acetaldehyde, it's the acetaldehyde that is poisonous. We've found methods for dealing with other poisons after ingestion, maybe some of the same methods would work for acetaldehyde.

Drinking alcohol also depletes the body of water and B vitamins.

So those areas seem like the place to start.

Some people have genetics that make mu and delta opiate receptors respond to alcohol in an unfortunate way. Easy fix, just don't be born as one of those people /s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com