New gel breaks down alcohol in the body
ethz.ch
ethz.ch
Also works great for hangovers.
Something tells me if they can't provide such a trivial result, it ain't working as folks expect (and god knows what nasty side effects it can have).
While it doesn’t alleviate all of the hangover symptoms it does nearly eliminate all of the most unpleasant ones.
For the rest of us though, what’s left over is a mild lethargic unfocused feeling, no headaches or nausea just a strong need not to be bothered and lay around all morning.
If it wasn't pleasant, not that many people would endure it regularly as there are.
Is the theory here that because the digestive tracks is a large organs filled with blood the resulting ALDH would interact?
My next question is do these, and how many, probiotic bacteria survive the acid wash of the stomach?
Are there studies around this?
As for the expense, I just view it adding a beer to the night. At least where I am beers are generally ~$9 a pop (more once you add tip & tax) so it's about the same. And to be honest, the productivity gain from the next morning not being so rough has generally been worth it.
Take something like Broccomax - or eat lots of Brussels sprouts, and broccoli.
"Not your parents sprouts anymore"
For the record I loved them 30 years ago and still love em.
My recipe is very different to the modern fashion, boiled until mushy with a slice of smokey bacon, drain and eat with butter. They literally melt like butter - delicious.
You won't feel as drunk and will have less of a hangover.
Of all the negatives, I think diminished sleep is the one that doesn’t get enough attention.
It’s superficial sleep at best. You’re up peeing 3,4,5 times a night. You never enter REM sleep. You’re dragging the entire next day. All to do it over again to your body the next day?
Of the people that I know that drink actively almost every day, they look like shit, and lack motivation.
Their body is crying out for rest and better food but they just keep drinking through their signals.
So just like being a parent then.
And drinking lots of water just before sleeping greatly reduces hangovers.
What also works, is drinking in moderation ..
The best use I can think of is for undercover agents to drink heavily and avoid intoxication!
My mother for example hate the feeling of being intoxicated, even a little. So she only drink one glass on occasions and barely finishes it. She would definitely enjoy it more if she could have different wines over the course of a meal. It would also be useful if you want to enjoy the taste of some drinks with alcohol but you need to drive or you are in an on-call schedule.
_But_ they also make you less drunk and making the drunkenness less... pleasant?
Sample size of like... 4 nights out having nomihoudai.
But it's the fun of alcohol!
What'd be amazing would be something that really works against the headaches and/or prevent vomiting. Basically something for the next day or even the next two days (when you get old, if you party too hard it can take two days to feel good again: I hate it so at 50 I very rarely party hard anymore: maybe once a year).
- Alcohol loosens the blood vessels, whereas a lot of the effects of a hangover are caused by the body then "over-constricting" when the aclohol goes away, causing headaches and nausea. The cause of the headache is similar for a brain-freeze from too much ice cream causing the veins in your neck and throat to constrict, though the brain-freeze goes away as you warm back up.
- There's also the dehydration as alcohol throws off the balance of water in your system as it makes you want to pee more, but interferes with the body's ability to actually absorb water.
- Alcohol causes your body to pump out more "feel good" hormones, which then lead to a crash later.
However, people often tend to drink for the "good" effects that this gel prevents. If what you want is alcohol's fun, then you're going to need another cure (essentially an IV drip, and drugs to replace the hormones and loosen your blood vessels - all of which are not readily available for other good reasons).
People go out partying on near-empty stomachs and take crazy amounts of alcoholic drinks with not so much as a drop of water all night; it's no surprise that their bodies react that extremely.
Also, sticking to drinks with low levels of congeners helps immensely. Ethanol is already toxic enough without throwing other more dangerous alcohols into the mix.
Regular beer contains about 20x as much water as it does ethanol (by volume), but apparently that's not enough. It's certainly better than wine, though, which only contains 6-8x the water and an entire catalogue of congeners.
I could see drinking water, then sobering up, and going to sleep could mean water could then be absorbed. That may limit the effects of the dehydration and therefore the hangover.
Also your body's overall health and efficiency probably pays a role. In my teens/20s I could get sloshed and wake up with merely a vague discomfort. In my 30s I started to get actual hangovers. In my 40s its now just awful almost no matter what I do.
On the plus side, I'm saving money drinking less in general...
It's genuinely one of my big wishes! I'd pay 5x the normal price for a bottle of whisky that neither has the "good" nor "bad" parts, as if it was water but with the same taste.
Some is down to the metabolic products of ethanol, specifically aldehydes. There are other alcohols (like tert-Amyl alcohol) that people have used recreationally which don't cause hangovers in the same way.
There are other great reasons not to mess with these substances (tert-Amyl is very long lasting and as little as 30ml might kill you), but they do show that some of the hangover is down to the specifics of ethanol's breakdown in the body.
If you start vomiting then you overdid it. Your body is trying to save you from poisoning. To prevent the headaches just drink lots of water.
For a while it is. But sometimes you don’t want to keep being drunk.
Maybe you want to drive home, or your childcare ends, or you just have other things to do that day.
If I could just end the whole thing at will, including the hangovers you mention, that would be ideal.
(All of this is obviously just for me. Well aware that different things affect different people...differently.)
you sure you didn't just lower your tolerance?
Meh, I like wine more and more and being drunk less and less, one is seriously limiting the other :)
But then again, we're not beer tasters or into craft stuff, so maybe we can't tell.
Not "this is so good you have to try it", but better than a lot of real beers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disulfiram
(if you take it, you will get sick if you drink alcohol)
Personally, tequila works on me in a similar way when I smell it.
So this gel seems like drinking less booze with extra steps. I do see a use for women and undercover cops though. Or to make people think you are drunker than you are.
But if their way of partying is to get drunk, this gel will prevent them from partying, since getting drunk requires the alcohol to get into your bloodstream.
EDIT: Apparently acetic acid _does_ have calories. Didn't know that.
Calories are measured by burning the substance. While it very precisely determines contained energy in the physics sense, it's a question whether all that energy is used by digestion? Especially if it's something the body treats as a toxin and wants to remove as soon as possible?
Also, substances like ethanol and acetic acid are not digested, they pretty much just go straight into the bloodstream. There is a limit on how much e.g. ethanol the liver can process per hour, which does put a cap on how many of ethanol's calories are released as ATP + body heat. Acetic acid is a normal temporary metabolite though and so its consumption is much more complete (it gets used by cells all over).
From this article[0] it seems ~60% of the calories in lager come from the alcohol - presumably ~40% come from carbohydrates. And from Google, acetic acid is 349 kcal / 100g, versus pure ethanol at 700 kcal / 100g. So if this approach converted 100% of alcohol to acetic acid, you'd drop the calories from lager by ~30% overall. To your question, dry wine or lower-carb beer would be proportionally even better.
The flip-side of this is perhaps consumption of too much acetic acid! It's impossible to calculate potential toxicity without understanding the strength of the acetic acid generated, though.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331119759_Nutrition...
Metabolism matters. Gasoline is over 800kcal/100g, but you wouldn't get that much from it (if anything at all).
Alcohol has a particularly long metabolic pathway, which after ingesting approximately 20-30g gets cut short to one where acetic acid is excreted (commonly known as "breaking the seal") and the overall upper energy yield limit becomes approximately 110kcal/100g.
Executive summary is that on a given session it's the first two 12oz (330ml) beers which provide most of the calories from alcohol and their contribution is on par with a snickers bar.
The latest science says the safe number of drinks might be one. Per week. If you’re not keeping it to that you’re harming your health. (And if you’re keeping it to one per week there’s no need to break it down in the body) just keep it out of there to begin with.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/07/10/327854051/al...
edit: ah, I read TFA:
> "Yeast can degrade ethanol," says microbiologist Benjamin Tu of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. "But they love other sugars — glucose, maltose — more. When those sugars are around, the cells turn off the genes needed for alcohol degradation."
Likely no. This stuff will destroy the alcohol before it enters the bloodstream. So it sounds useful to stop people absorbing more alcohol (pumping the stomach situations) but won't do much for alcohol already in the blood and causing effects in the body.
Quitting alcohol requires medical supervision for those who are deep into alcohol use disorder.
perhaps what you really want is something to block glucose absorption?
I understand harm reduction but what is the point of reducing the intoxicating effects of alcohol? What's the point?
I'd really like to enjoy it without any drunkenness afterwards nor any effect on my health.
- drinking it: I really enjoy the feeling of just ingesting beer, wine or spirits, especially with friends or family
- having a nice buzz from it.
However, those two things are, for me, incompatible. If I start drinking a little bit, I usually don't stop until I'm way beyond the "nice buzz". As the joke goes, "one beer is not enough, two beers are just enough, three beers really aren't enough".
Having something that would allow me to keep drinking without jeopardizing my body, my mind, and the day after would be a huge game changer.
I have tried almost every major non-alcoholic beer in the U.S., and none of them truly taste exactly like beer.
Agreed, but if you drink them exclusively for a few weeks, your taste buds and brain will reframe around them, and it'll cease to be a problem. I did this with Brewdog's Punk AF, and after 2 weeks on that, most non-alcoholic beers triggered my brain's "I'm drinking beer!" response.
It's a lot of work for overpriced soft drinks, and isn't for everyone.
Also, I'm back to drinking real beer again anyway.
Some are really good. If you like german weissbeer then Franziskaner Alkoholfrei is more or less indistiguishable to me.
There are other good ones too.
Obviously not something everyone wants to do or can do, it's legal for me, but it's great for basically taking my interest in alcohol away after a beer or two. Microdosing is usually 1/10th or less what a "normal" light dose would be (going with 1-2g dose here, so 0.1/0.2). No weird/visual/hallucination effects or anything like that.
You just feel a bit lighter and relaxed. Been a big game changer for me since I go out all the time. A bunch of my service industry friends and I do it and they've all started drinking significantly less.
Naltrexone is great too but it's probably easier to get someone to microdose than ask their doctor for that which is unfortunate. You won't get a buzz with that, you'll just get bored of drinking by your 2nd beer and move on to doing other things which can also be nice at times.
There's also people who have difficulty controlling their drinking once they start. This would certainly help in those scenarios.
Another example is a situation where a woman may be pregnant so doesn't want to drink, but may not be far enough along that she wants people to know. Not drinking would get people wondering, but drinking could harm the fetus. I don't know if this gel would make drinking safe in that scenario - but if it does, that would be a great situation to use it in.
I quit cold turkey years ago. I was worried about the same things. But even my most macho & hard-drinking friends just accepted it without comment.
Don't surround yourself with people who make you uncomfortable. It's a lesson I realized as I got older: It has little to do with drinking; but if the people around you make you feel uncomfortable not drinking, then you're around the wrong people.
I wish I learnt this at age 0. This goes for online life as well.
People don't care as much if/what others drink as you think.
But misunderstood, see below…
Then there's also the market for wine and spirits.
I couldn't get into the Untitled Art. Just too sweet.
Ehhh... that's a bit of an overstatement, though I mostly agree.
I just happened to be doing a crapload of bar hopping this last month and got into trying different non-alcoholic beers because they're way more prevalent than they used to be.
They're certainly a lot better than the nonalcoholic beers of yore. And it's also obvious that you're not drinking a traditional beer. Undoubtedly, it has to do with the lack of ethanol present, but I can't help but think it's got to do with the process of producing them. Nonalcoholic beers, from what I've noticed, are usually much less foamy than alcoholic beer.
I will generally still drink alcoholic beer since I don't seem to have alcoholism in me, but I think it's great that people are being given options. When I was younger, I really hated it when people would pressure me to drink or act like I'm an alien for not wanting to drink, and nonalcoholic beer is inconspicuous enough that people can drink socially without the peculiar attitude. Although that attitude seems to have largely gone away anyway.
https://evodiabio.com/yops/ https://science.ku.dk/english/press/news/2022/researchers-ma...
I get that alcoholic drinks taste better than their non-alcoholic counterparts (frozen margaritas are so much better than slush puppies,) but this won't prevent the buzz / intoxication.
> The gel shifts the breakdown of alcohol from the liver to the digestive tract. In contrast to when alcohol is metabolised in the liver, no harmful acetaldehyde is produced as an intermediate product,” explains Professor Raffaele Mezzenga from the Laboratory of Food & Soft Materials at ETH Zurich. Acetaldehyde is toxic and is responsible for many health problems caused by excessive alcohol consumption.
Using this gel would manifest as simply not being as intoxicated, whereas Zbiotics is intended to allow for intoxication but prevent the hangover afterwards.
There's also more diversity in the options because it's a natural preservative. Much easier for a store to stock niche-flavored spirits in small quantities when they functionally never go bad, which in turn helps keep a market for niche products that wouldn't exist if they needed steady high demand. Even something as popular as Fernet Branca doesn't really have a flavor equal in any other beverage class.
Perhaps you haven't tried very many and haven't run into any you like, but they're sure out there. From a culinary perspective, it's no accident that wines and beers and spirits represent enormous industries around the world and have done so for centuries.
If it was all just about getting tipsy or drunk, you'd expect there to be just a few "winners" of the market rather than the incredible variety we seem to have instead.
Your point about variety is good but, again playing devil's advocate, maybe that's necessary to keep drinking socially acceptable and sustain the illusion that there's more to it than just addiction?
The most convincing argument though is that we do enjoy the flavors of fermented things that aren't intoxicating.
I strongly suspect that, if alcohol was banned, you would see a bigger market for taste-matched "mocktails" with the same sharp, chemical undertones. However, there's no market now because moderate drinkers can just get a drink and people who don't like they taste don't want them.
Mocktail mixers are a small but readily available product, e.g. Seedlip.
Again, I don't speak for everyone. I do know people who drink frequently without ever getting drunk, but obviously even one drink has some effect.
I do have plenty of friends who drink in moderation simply because they enjoy the taste of beer/wine and almost never get drunk (they might drink enough to be drunk once a year).
I think the comparison is most understandable when you compare alcohol to caffeine. Some people drink coffee for the sake of the caffeine, but some also just genuinely enjoy the taste/social aspect (hence why decaf exists).
Even a single sip of wine, and I'll start to feel pressure in temples. One full glass and my head movement -> visual perception latency will be noticeable, and my words will start a bit getting in the order wrong. That one glass will also hit me like a sleeping pill within an hour. And if it's beer or red wine, I'll enjoy itchy arms, chest, and legs for a couple of hours.
So partially a reaction to alcohol (the sleepiness for sure) and partially an allergic reaction to tannins/hops/etc.
I love a riesling or a mint mojito, but I keep to probably one drink every few months... and then regret it all over again.
On the other hand, there's so many alcoholics in my extended family and my best friends growing up, that I consider my body's rejection of alcohol to be a strong contributor to me being successful in life and work.
You could put it on your chips post-pub and eliminate the need for vinegar!
But I like milk, and milk products. I like the taste of it, the ease of it, and the way it makes me feel. It's nice for me, or at least it is until (some time later) it is not nice anymore.
So, I keep inexpensive tablets that contain the lactase enzyme in my kitchen.
Eating one of these tablets around the time that I consume milk completely eliminates the messy unpleasantness that lactose has on me. Poof, gone.
I don't think it's strange at all to do this. In fact, learning that I could easily (and very selectively) deal with my problems with lactose has made a pretty huge improvement in my quality of life.
Why would you think that taking something to remove the unpleasantness of alcohol would be any different, functionally?
And, no, drinking lactose-free milk isn't "easier" for me than "taking the pill."
1. Lactose-free milk is very available to me. But I do not buy it because it costs me around 2-4x as much by volume compared to regular milk, which is much harder on my pocketbook than the combination of drinking regular milk and eating a $0.10 tablet (which I can get down to $0.06 by buying in larger quantities, if I choose). This has parallels to things like NA beer, wherein: Regular beer can be very cheap, but NA beer is never quite that way.
2. Lactase tablets are much, much more portable than lactose-free milk is. It's very easy to bring some with me when I travel, whereas bringing along lactose-free milk has obvious problems. This portability has parallels with the thing discussed in TFA.
3. Lactose-free milk does not taste like regular milk. Its flavor profile is related, and it can be enjoyed, but it remains different and I strongly prefer regular milk. Even without issues #1 and #2, buying and drinking lactose-free milk can only be "easier" if I'm somehow willing to overlook the fact these are not the same things. This concept has parallels in the discussions that others have here in these threads, wherein people report that regular drinks and NA drinks do not taste the same.
There are a whole lot of people that get a whole lot out of consuming beverages that contain alcohol while not wanting to become intoxicated. Your use case doesn't involve that, but as someone who spent decades working in the food and bev industry, I assure you that you can't generalize your use case to everyone.
No-- sharing alcoholic beverages is symbolic in a way fruit juice is not.
> If it's true, then no one should mind being the designated driver.
No-- many people enjoy being intoxicated and sharing alcoholic beverages is an important social bonding exercise to many.
> I don't know if you've ever been out for drinks, but the reason you go is to get drunk.
I worked in bars and nightclubs as a bouncer and bartender for nearly two decades and was a 4-or-5-days-per-week regular in them for about a decade. After not having been to bars frequently in at least 5 years, I've got at least half a dozen bars I could walk into right now and not pay for alcohol. I might know more about this than anyone you've ever met.
> Sometimes you want to be more on the tipsy end than on the blackout end, but that is still drinking. The difference between drinking and a tea party is alcohol, and it blows my mind that you don't think that's significant.
I did not even intimate that drinking alcohol and non-alcoholic beverages isn't significantly different. What you seem to miss is that it's not different in the same way for everybody. Our preferences and experiences can't simply be superimposed on everyone else.
> The people who want to meet up and drink something without alcohol go to cafés, not bars.
Some do. My wife doesn't really drink, hates the smell of coffee, and worked in the service industry for 25 years. When she wants to meet up with friends, she goes to a bar. Not only is it the traditional meeting venue among people we know, it's got an entirely different energy than a cafe does. Usually she drinks seltzer with lemon, but sometimes she has a cocktail because she loves the social act of drinking together and thinks they taste delicious, but always regrets the grogginess, headaches, and other side-effects she gets from alcohol. Sometimes when there's a big round of shots going around-- a very common social bonding tradition, especially among service industry workers-- she often feels compelled to hide the fact that she surreptitiously slipped me the shot because I have a much higher tolerance. I discretely hand the empty glass back to her and she puts it down. This has happened literally dozens of times. If there was a way for her to partake in the shot or have a cocktail with friends while not having the requisite physical effects, she'd jump on it.
Beyond that, bartenders doing shots with customers is a huge money maker. When customers feel like they're having an experience with a bartender rather than one provided by a bartender, it's an entirely different experience. It's more fun for the customers, sometimes more fun for the bartenders, and usually elicits much bigger tips. A bartender being able to consume a bunch of alcohol and maintain coherency would be a huge boon. Right now, a lot of them just do a bunch of coke or chew on adderall-- beyond maybe 30 that loses its appeal pretty quickly. That's what the line cooks did in an 'edgy' place I cooked at with an open kitchen where customers could buy the kitchen staff beer. We were expected to drink it and look like we're having fun in an extremely high-volume, high-performance kitchen. Lots of key bumps and popped pills would be replaced with a product that made it unnecessary.
> There's a good reason why these two things haven't been combined.
... they haven't? Some cafes serve alcohol-- several coffee/pastry shops in my city serve wine and cocktails. Even a few of the breakfast/lunch focused diners have full bars. Brunch is essentially breakfast with optional cocktails. Some bars serve coffee. I worked as a chef at a little rock club that was a portuguese expat bar during the day-- old timers would line up outside at 8am waiting for the doors to open up so they could sip espresso, read the newspaper, and chat. Some would occasionally have a brandy at some point, some would stay for lunch and have a beer. Many wouldn't, and were just there for the community.
One of the most popular nightclubs in a city I lived in opened at 2am-- after the legally mandated last call time-- and they never sold one drop of alcohol. Some people went there to use other kinds of drugs. Lots of people went there who didn't drink but enjoyed being in a nightclub atmosphere without the pressure to drink. Some were recovering alcoholics. Some just wanted to dance after other clubs had closed and drank a lot beforehand. Some were underage and it was the only club they could get into. Some tried to sneak their own alcohol in, though security was necessarily tight for legal reasons and they rarely succeeded.
One large raucous club I bounced at was near several large colleges. Knowing it was a magnet for bad behavior, the sports teams would send in members of their disciplinary staff undercover to spy on students-- I'll bet many of them would jump at the opportunity to drink something other than soda while finely controlling their intoxication level. Hell, I'll bet the higher-performing athletes would relish the opportunity to go to a frat party and drink alcohol as a social exercise without totally screwing up their training schedule. It would certainly make hazing a lot safer.
People's relationship with alcohol is just not that cut-and-dried. It's an incredibly complex topic, and you can't just take your experience and use case for something and superimpose it on the rest of humanity.
> No-- many people enjoy being intoxicated and sharing alcoholic beverages is an important social bonding exercise to many.
Okay so I feel like you didn't really get my argument here. I said "if X, then Y", but it's obvious that Y isn't the case, so I'm implying that X also isn't true. So you informing my that Y isn't true hasn't added much to the conversation. An alcoholic drink without alcohol is just juice, the fact that there is no demand for juice at bars suggests that there would also be little demand for non-alcoholic drinks. Especially when you have to consume some weird gel afterwards. I was refuting your point by saying it implied something which isn't true. This is known as "reductio ad absurdum" and is a fairly common argumentative tactic.
> I might know more about this than anyone you've ever met.
Just because you've sold people drinks doesn't mean you understand why people buy them. I think you probably don't given you think this weird gel stuff could ever be popular.
> sometimes she has a cocktail because she loves the social act of drinking together and thinks they taste delicious
Alcohol-free cocktails exist. They are called "mocktails" and are very popular if I understand correctly. What the gel offers is the experience of a mocktail with the addition of a strange chemical jelly substance that you have to eat. No one is going to buy that.
> she often feels compelled to hide the fact that she surreptitiously slipped me the shot because I have a much higher tolerance
So now she will feel compelled to hide the fact that she's eating the gel. You've just shifted the problem forward a few seconds. Either she drinks, or she doesn't drink and hides it. Changing the mechanism of how it's hidden doesn't change the fact that she's hiding it. This is a product that simply sounds good in theory without offering much practically.
> having an experience with a bartender
It's fun because the bartender is getting drunk. If the bartender was just taking shots of water, I don't think it would work as well. A shot of Vodka minus the alcohol is essentially a shot of water with a funny aftertaste, which is what you are proposing. I suppose you could trick customers into tipping this way by hiding the gel, but you could also do that by discretely swapping a shot out for plain water. I just think people would get a little suspicious if the bartender is knocking back shots and not getting drunk.
> I'll bet the higher-performing athletes would relish the opportunity to go to a frat party and drink alcohol as a social exercise without totally screwing up their training schedule
Again, you assume that drinking liquid is the social aspect, but it isn't. The social thing, as you have said earlier, is getting drunk which this gel prevents. If you drink a glass of cider then down this gel, you have just drunk a glass of apple juice, and as we've established, juice and alcohol have different social purposes.
A) Saying that as a decades-long professional in this business that I don't understand people's motivation for purchasing the product is pretty ridiculous. It's not like I was a distiller-- understanding why, when, where and how people consumed alcohol was why I was successful in that business. Beyond that, monitoring peoples alcohol consumption is a critical part of the job.
B) As I said, I spent over a decade as a 4-5 night per week regular in bars.
C) As a bouncer, I specifically engaged with the way people use alcohol and interact in situations not just selling it to them.
I deeply understand what goes on on both sides of the bar. It was my profession and hobby.
> An alcoholic drink without alcohol is just juice, the fact that there is no demand for juice at bars suggests that there would also be little demand for non-alcoholic drinks.
> Alcohol-free cocktails exist. They are called "mocktails" and are very popular if I understand correctly.
I think we're just about done here. Have a nice day.
Yeah, sold mostly at cafés, not pubs. And there's a heck of a gap between those and the enzymatic gel you are proposing people eat.
Sorry-- you're just completely, factually wrong. It's not just the market where I am, either. I just did a google search for "best mocktails in [New York/London/Paris/Los Angeles]" and every one of the top articles almost exclusively highlighted bars or restaurants with bars-- all establishments that primarily serve alcoholic cocktails. If that's not true where you are, where you are is not representative. If you don't believe me, Google "why do people drink mocktails" and honestly consider if your assumptions match your research.
> why do people drink mocktails
Because they taste good. Does this gel taste good? Probably not. It is fundamentally unpleasant, pointless, and strange. It solves a problem that has better solutions everyone is familiar with. It offers people nothing but discomfort and abnormality, and worse most people don't even understand what it does. It is perhaps the epitome of an unmarketable product.
I really hope you reflect on whether you're more interested in being right, or feeling right, because the difference is consequential.
You told me to Google it. I'll make a guess that you aren't the academic type, but trust me when I say that generally isn't accepted as a source.
> I really hope you reflect on whether you're more interested in being right, or feeling right, because the difference is consequential.
And what's brilliant is that I can both be and feel correct in the knowledge that this stuff will never be popular. You'd struggle to give it away for free, let alone get people to pay for it.
> you aren't entertaining any contrary information
I've entertained plenty of contrary information and explained why I don't believe it. You've addressed almost nothing I've said except by making spurious claims that you working as a bartender more than half a decade ago somehow means you are psychically in tune with people, and they all went to eat weird anti-alcohol jelly.
I really hope you can reflect on how to make actually convincing arguments for your perspective instead of just calling people stupid and flaunting your """experience""" while ignoring everything you are told.
No-- sharing alcoholic beverages is symbolic in a way fruit juice is not.
> If it's true, then no one should mind being the designated driver.
No-- many people enjoy being intoxicated and sharing alcoholic beverages is an important social bonding exercise to many.
> I don't know if you've ever been out for drinks, but the reason you go is to get drunk.
I worked in bars and nightclubs as a bouncer and bartender for nearly two decades and was a 4-or-5-days-per-week regular in them for about a decade. After not having been to bars frequently in at least 5 years, I've got at least half a dozen bars I could walk into right now and not pay for alcohol. I might know more about drinking in public than anyone you've ever met.
> Sometimes you want to be more on the tipsy end than on the blackout end, but that is still drinking. The difference between drinking and a tea party is alcohol, and it blows my mind that you don't think that's significant.
Maybe you should re-read what I wrote. Not once did I even intimate that drinking alcohol and non-alcoholic beverages isn't significantly different. What you don't seem to realize is that it's not different in the same way for everybody. Believe it or not, you can't generalize your preferences and experiences to everyone else. You just can't.
> The people who want to meet up and drink something without alcohol go to cafés, not bars.
Some do. My wife doesn't really drink, hates the smell of coffee, and worked in the service industry for 25 years. When she wants to meet up with friends, she goes to a bar. Not only is it the traditional meeting venue among people we know, it's got an entirely different energy than a cafe does. Usually she drinks seltzer with lemon, but sometimes she has a cocktail because she loves the social act of drinking together and thinks they taste delicious, but always regrets the grogginess, headaches, and other side-effects she gets from alcohol. Sometimes when there's a big round of shots going around-- a very common social bonding tradition, especially among service industry workers-- she often feels compelled to hide the fact that she surreptitiously slipped me the shot because I have a much higher tolerance. I discretely hand the empty glass back to her and she puts it down. This has happened literally dozens of times. If there was a way for her to partake in the shot or have a cocktail with friends while not having the requisite physical effects, she'd jump on it.
Beyond that, bartenders doing shots with customers is a huge money maker. When customers feel like they're having an experience with a bartender rather than one provided by a bartender, it's an entirely different experience. It's more fun for the customers, sometimes more fun for the bartenders, and usually elicits much bigger tips. A bartender being able to consume a bunch of alcohol and maintain coherency would be a huge boon. Right now, a lot of them just do a bunch of coke or chew on adderall-- beyond maybe 30 that loses its appeal pretty quickly. That's what the line cooks did in an 'edgy' place I cooked at with an open kitchen where customers could buy the kitchen staff beer. We were expected to drink it and look like we're having fun in an extremely high-volume, high-performance kitchen. Lots of key bumps and popped pills would be replaced with a product that made it unnecessary.
> There's a good reason why these two things haven't been combined.
... they haven't? Some cafes serve alcohol-- several coffee/pastry shops in my city serve wine and cocktails. Even a few of the breakfast/lunch focused diners have full bars. Brunch is essentially breakfast with optional cocktails. Some bars serve coffee. I worked as a chef at a little rock club that was a portuguese expat bar during the day-- old timers would line up outside at 8am waiting for the doors to open up so they could sip espresso, read the newspaper, and chat. Some would occasionally have a brandy at some point, some would stay for lunch and have a beer. Many wouldn't, and were just there for the community.
One of the most popular nightclubs in a city I lived in opened at 2am-- after the legally mandated last call time-- and they never sold one drop of alcohol. Some people went there to use other kinds of drugs. Lots of people went there who didn't drink but enjoyed being in a nightclub atmosphere without the pressure to drink. Some were recovering alcoholics. Some just wanted to dance after other clubs had closed and drank a lot beforehand. Some were underage and it was the only club they could get into. Some tried to sneak their own alcohol in, though security was necessarily tight for legal reasons and they rarely succeeded.
One large raucous club I bounced at was near several large colleges. Knowing it was a magnet for bad behavior, the sports teams would send in members of their disciplinary staff undercover to spy on students-- I'll bet many of them would jump at the opportunity to drink something other than soda while finely controlling their intoxication level. Hell, I'll bet the higher-performing athletes would relish the opportunity to go to a frat party and drink alcohol as a social exercise without totally screwing up their training schedule. It would certainly make hazing a lot safer.
People's relationship with alcohol is just not that cut-and-dried. It's an incredibly complex topic, and you can't just take your experience and use case for something and superimpose it on the rest of humanity. It just doesn't work like that.
You know far less about this topic than you think you do.
I'm talking about bits like these:
> Maybe you should re-read what I wrote
> What you don't seem to realize
> You know far less about this topic than you think you do
They don't add to your substantive points, but they do poison the conversation and almost always evoke worse from others. We're trying to avoid that here.
Also, anything that can rapidly break down alcohol in the body will help as a medical treatment for alcohol overdoses.
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