Science Friday
Do sugary drinks really cause more intense hangovers? Is wine both bad for you and good for you? Experts take on the chemistry of happy hour.
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Hey, it's Jane Lindholm, filling in for Ira and Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. We are on the precipice of summer right now, so that means the season for porch beers and happy hours is upon us. I myself am partial to a midweek near beer these days. You know, we nerds here at Science Friday have been thinking a lot about the science of alcohol. More data is coming out that shows it's not really good for us to drink, but a lot of us do it anyway. So what's going on in the chemistry of our alcoholic bevies? And what are they doing to our brains and bodies? Joining me now are Dr. Tom Shellhammer, a brewer and professor of fermentation science at Oregon State University. He's the past president of the American Society of Brewing Chemists,
and Dr. Jackie Barker, who studies what alcohol does to our brains and our memories at Drexel University's College of Medicine. Welcome to Science Friday to you both. It's great to have you with us.
I'm delighted to be here.
Likewise.
Jackie, start us off. How do you think about this tension that we know drinking isn't good for us, but we do it anyway?
Sure, yeah. And I think one of the challenges is being informed. And I think it's really awesome that you're starting this conversation because being able to have the information to make a smart choice about whether you want to enjoy a beer or two beers, or maybe you make that near beer decision. It starts with that information. And I think, you know, there's a growing appreciation that even small amounts of alcohol do impact our brain, do impact behavior. But so do a lot of other things we do. Eating lunch meat, sodas, living in a city where you have to rely on cars. And so we're all making choices across our lives about which rewards are valuable enough to us
to maybe take some risk alongside them.
Jackie, do you drink?
I do.
Tom, do you drink?
Yeah, for me, it's soft-serve ice cream, which in Vermont, we call creamies. And I know it's not doing me any good physically, but mentally, it is crucial to my mental health.
Oh, yeah. I think we need to do things that make us enjoy ourselves and happy. And alcohol is part of that. I think it's been part of that for, you know. Millennia.
Yes.
We have a lot of listeners who have questions about alcohol and its effects on us and things that we've sort of heard over the years, maybe, but don't really know what the science says. So let's start with this call that we got about alcohol.
Hi, my name's Mike and I'm calling from Santa Barbara, California. I've always wondered if it's just kind of a psychosomatic thing, but do different alcohols affect different people differently? So when I drink tequila, I feel really good and like almost no hangover the next day. But when I drink gin or rum, I feel pretty bad. And is that, am I just making this up because I want to like tequila? Or does it really have different effects on different people's physiologies? That's it. Thank you.
I love this question because I have heard that so many times over the year that certain alcohol will make you feel a certain way and others won't. Is that right, Jackie? Or is it all in our heads?
Well, I think that the answer to this is yes and no, right? So I mean, I hope Tom will weigh in as well. But I think part of this is that the way we drink different alcohol is often very different. Tequila shots might look like a very different night than red wine on your couch. And the speed that you consume that alcohol, whether you're eating with your alcohol or having a night out dancing, whether you're staying hydrated alongside that is going to have a variety of different effects on that next morning and on how you associate learned experiences and environmental outcomes with that particular alcohol. And so I think a lot of people I hear also, you know, I have a really fun
time. I get, we used to call it getting wheels when I was in college when I have tequila. Or I always feel really relaxed and want to read a book when I have red wine. That's not necessarily the difference of the alcohol. It's the context and how you've learned to consume those alcohols.
Yeah, Tom, what about the chemistry here? Is alcohol just alcohol, just alcohol? Or are there differences?
It kind of depends. So like the basic production process of making any alcoholic beverage starts with some sort of fermentable sugar and yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae mainly, and some other cases, um, some different Saccharomyces or non Saccharomyces strains, but these organisms are converting these fermentable sugars into ethanol. And ethanol is the, the alcohol that we find in all alcoholic beverages. The starting material varies. Grapes are fermented to wine, mashed, malted barley is fermented into beer, agave is fermented into uh pulkay. And these have ethanol in them, but they all have these other components that come from the starting material. That, that, that's what makes wine taste different than beer,
that tastes different than pulkay. And then if we've got a distillation on top of that, we end up concentrating the ethanol and we concentrate some of these other flavorants that are coming from either the byproducts of the fermentation or from the starting material. So you ferment wine, you get brandy, you ferment beer, you get whiskey, you ferment pulkay, you get tequila. So, and on one hand, the ethanol part is like a, a common thread amongst all these, but it's these other minor components that, that make brandy taste different than tequila, or certainly wine taste different than beer. And as Jackie pointed out, it's the combination of these things. And, and also then what you do with that, that beverage by itself. Are you drinking tequila straight? Or are you
making margaritas out of it? Making margaritas, you've got both sugar and salt there that are kind of, uh, have an interplay with, with alcohol. And the cumulative effect and kind of impacts how you're going to feel that evening or the next morning.
While we're talking about how we react to alcohol, let's listen to another call that we got.
Hey, I'm Bob calling from Fort Wayne. I was wondering why alcohol does and does not sedate certain people? Because the other night I had about thirteen shots worth of alcohol over the course of four hours on nearly an empty stomach. And I did not blackout. Uh, I went to sleep at about 2:00 AM and I woke up at 8:00 AM the next day feeling completely fine, except I ran around my entire neighborhood about five times over, um, and absolutely wrecked my house. So I'm just wondering if it metabolizes into something different or how the sedation works for different people. Thanks.
Okay, well, that's quite a story. Jackie, what do you make of it? And how we process alcohol?
So, you know, whether alcohol is sedative at a given moment for a person is going to depend on a lot of things. That will depend on the dose, how much alcohol certainly Bob, I believe it was, consumed a fairly high dose of alcohol here. And that would certainly be a sedative dose across a large range of conditions. My first thought is that Bob may have woken up still intoxicated, which drove him to be motivated to run around and perhaps impact his home in unexpected ways. I mean, I will say that as we metabolize alcohol, right,
our blood alcohol concentration will come back down. And so you may reach some of those less sedative doses on both ends, right? So you have sort of an ascending side and then a descending side of this blood alcohol concentration in this case where he's consuming and then metabolizing. And so depending on the exact timing of the runabout, he may sort of been in that stimulatory phase of intoxication at that time.
Jackie, what do you think about tolerance in terms of like, for a person who is a regular consumer of alcohol versus someone who isn't, I think these effects can be very different.
Yes, I completely agree, Tom. Absolutely. People who are regular consumers do develop tolerance. It is absolutely the case that people who regularly drink, especially if they drink with, instead of being a regular binge drinker, for example, where you drink a large amount of alcohol only on Friday night, for example, someone who is drinking frequently on repeated consecutive days is very likely to develop tolerance and be able to consume higher amounts of alcohol without experiencing as high sedative effects or potentially those deleterious acute consequences.
I mean, Tom, Bob also didn't tell us what was in the shots. You know, do, do things that are added to alcohol sometimes change the way we feel and react to them? I mean, some, some shots might have a lot of sugar in them. Some could even have caffeine or other things.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's exactly where I was going to like, if you, if you're mixing caffeine and ethanol, that's a, I'm gonna call it amplifying combination, but it's a catalyzing combination. And that's one reason why like, we don't see caffeinated alcohol drinks anymore on the market because they can be potentially dangerous. If you don't really realize the alcohol level that you're consuming or the caffeine that you're consuming, you're kind of cranking both of those up and you get yourself in kind of a dangerous spot.
Well, that actually brings us to our next call.
Hi, my name's Sadie. I'm calling from Burlington, Vermont. I feel like I always hear people saying, you know, oh, you're gonna get such a bad hangover if you drink really sugary drinks, right? Because like the alcohol and the sugar. Is it the alcohol that's actually interacting with the sugar that's causing the issue? Or is it just a combination of drinking and also having a lot of added sugar in the body? And the two of them put together is just too much?
Tom, I saw you nodding as Sadie was talking about sugary drinks and the interaction.
Yeah, I'm, I'm thinking less about like a biochemical interaction, but more of like a sort of physiological, maybe lifestyle interaction. Sugar is one of these, these molecules that as humans, we love, right? We're just, we're primed for like little hummingbirds in some respects. So we love sugar, it sort of stimulates that, like, I like it button. So that can potentially move people into consuming more alcohol than that they had realized. Particularly if you're drinking very sugary drinks. Alcohol itself is a diuretic, so it has a dehydrating effect. Sugar kind of amplifies that as well. So you're kind of moving yourself into this area where you're very, gonna be very prone
to like the effects, the detoxification effects of alcohol. You got this ethanol detoxification, but you also have this dehydration that can, you can feel like you're drinking a lot. And in fact, you are, but, but your body's not hydrating. It's actually dehydrating. You're just kind of turning into like a little human raisin.
We have to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about shifts in people's tastes for alcohol and why low ABV is having a moment. Stay with us.
All right, let's take another listener question.
Hi, this is Kristin from Ventura, California, and I am dying to know more about the relationship with drinking alcohol, specifically wine, and how much do you need to be drinking to where you are most likely going to cause harm to your body? And the reason I'm asking that is we've swayed back and forth as a nurse. I've seen the information say, oh, drinking a glass of wine is good for you. Then now it's like, no, don't drink any. None of it is good for you. But my question for you is then what are people in Italy and France?
How are they getting away with it, or are they not? I do enjoy a glass of wine with dinner. It's part of my culture. But again, I don't want to be causing any harm. All right, thank you so much. Bye.
All right, there's a lot in that question. So, you know, how are we to make sense of this when people have had cultures of drinking for, you know, generations in some cases? Jackie, what do you think?
Yeah, so I mean, I think part of what was mentioned in that call is sort of this idea of consuming alcohol with a meal. I do think that this reflects in part a cultural difference that was hit on a little bit there in the US versus other places where often in other cultures you are having a glass of wine with dinner, not having as prevalent of a binge-like relationship as is seen often in the US. But to the science, I think that there are very clear emerging data that any alcohol Is is potentially having negative health consequences. Even a single glass of alcohol can increase risk for various cancers, cardiovascular disease.
And again, being informed of that means you can make the right choice for you. Is it worth it to increase your risk at whatever level it is? And people can make that that decision. But I think some of those early studies, there have been controversy around this idea that people who drink low amounts of alcohol are healthier than abstainers. Some of the data around that seem to suggest that actually there are a variety of confounds. People who completely abstain from alcohol often have other co-occurring health conditions. And so it may reflect that they have shorter life expectancy, other things that may drive the abstention, not drinking at all.
And then that can artificially make it seem like our low drinkers are a healthier population. So if it's not causative there, there's a lot baked into the data set that I think kind of created that false impression.
We've been hearing a lot recently about the difference in how we metabolize alcohol as we age, and that that can also make a really big change in how you experience drinking and whether and how much you choose to drink. Do you know about that science, Jackie?
So it is definitely the case that alcohol metabolism is alter as as a range of metabolic outcomes as we age. Some of this is related to if you have been a chronic drinker across your life, potentially accumulated effects on the liver, which can in fact impact metabolism. It also may be related to sort of a greater medical treatment burden as we age, right? You might be taking additional medications that are metabolized by similar proceeds. And so that might impact outcomes as well. But it is it is definitely the case that we see physiological changes that can facilitate ethanol impacts where the same doses can have greater impacts as we age.
You know, of course, Tom, not everybody chooses to drink alcohol and some people choose to drink things that are like alcohol but do not contain alcohol. And we're seeing a really large growth in no or low ABV beer where the alcohol has either been taken out or wasn't brewed into the process. Can you talk a little bit about how those drinks are being made and how you see that trend going?
Yeah, you're correct, Jane. There's a huge growth category in low and non-alcoholic beverages, beer, wine, and spirits. The divide that you have to cross to get from a non-alcoholic spirit, like from a spirit to a non-alcoholic spirit is huge. The brewers have to cross a much shorter divide. It's like only 5%. And so I think that's why you're seeing a lot of activity in this non-alcoholic beer space. And the way that brewers are making non-alcoholic beer fall into sort of three categories. One is to take a normal fermentation and just arrest it, stop it prematurely. Those are kind of first generation non-alcoholic beers. They're not terribly satisfying because they taste very waty, very sweet. They're
kind of cloying. They don't mimic a full-on alcohol beer. Another approach is to use techniques where you take a full-strength beer and just remove the alcohol. And so you can do this by distillation or by membrane separation. What happens there is that you're, in addition to pulling alcohol out, you're also pulling out a lot of these other flavors. And we talked at the beginning of the show around like higher alcohols or esters, other things that will move kind of like the ethanol away from the base beer. And so you get a very bland product. And so in that case, brewers will do flavor add-backs that will take the, like these alcohol, like higher alcohol ester materials that have left and add those back
to try to replace that minus the ethanol. And then a third approach is to use yeast that don't ferment maltose. So the main sugar in a brewery mash is maltose. There's a little bit of glucose, tiny bit of fruit, just mainly maltosis from a fermentability perspective and something called maltotriose. If you hunt for yeast that don't metabolize maltose, then we get a very small fermentation that doesn't bring the alcohol level above 0.5, which is kind of like a threshold for low alcohol. And what like really successful brands are doing are blending these different approaches. But some brands are doing, you know, great with this. Like Guinness Zero. It's just like taken off. It's way outperformed what they thought when they first started this.
And that's in a big scale. We've got smaller breweries like Tuchets. That, you know, big part of their brand now is that their non-alcoholic line. You have Athletic. It's a whole brewery that is just around non-alcoholic beer. And that brewery itself is like the fifth largest brand of craft beer.
Wow.
It's interesting. So there, and it's the one that's growing. And like a many, many breweries and winelands and just everything's kind of in a declining stage right now because of the demographics of young drinkers of kind of moving away from alcohol. The discussions you've had around health, a focus on lifestyle changes, people wanting to, to either not have as much caloric intake. And maybe not as much inebriation or intoxication. So that's driving this interest in the non-alcoholic space.
Jackie, I mean, we're especially seeing this in younger generations that are coming into legal age for drinking and are choosing not to or are choosing to drink much less. Is that related to some of what we've been hearing about alcohol being less healthy? Or, or is there something else afoot that you think?
I mean, I do think part of it, I hope, is public health messaging. We are actually effectively communicating to people that there is negative consequences to high levels of alcohol intake. I do think there's also very real behavioral changes in how young people are spending their Friday nights compared to, I'm not going to make any guesses about anyone's age, but compared to how I spend my Friday nights. And I think that people tend to socialize very differently. There's also in certain states, I think, access to legal marijuana has changed alcohol consumption as well. So there's been in some places a shift from one substance to another.
And so, and some of this is also in that case, non-caloric. And so there may be a perception that being California sober is perhaps healthier than other intake patterns. And so I do think that it reflects both, I hope, some of the public health messaging, but also broader changes in the way that young people are spending their Friday nights.
Jackie Barker is an associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology at Drexel University's College of Medicine. And Tom Schellheimer is a brewer and professor of fermentation science at Oregon State University. Thank you both for being with us and sharing this really interesting knowledge. Appreciate it.
Yes, it was fun. Thank you.
Yeah, fun discussion with you guys.
And that's it for today's show. If hearing this made you thirsty for more science content, you can tune into the podcast anytime. And hey, why not give us a review on your favorite podcast platform? Five stars, please. We'll catch you next time. I'm Jane Lindholm.
Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated