BOOZE that has been treated so that you sober up faster afterwards may sound like a drinker鈥檚 dream, but could end up being their downfall if it encourages heavy drinkers to consume even more alcohol.
Kwang-il Kwon and his colleagues at Chungnam National University in Daejeon, South Korea, gave 30 men and 19 women 360 millilitres of a drink containing 19.5 per cent alcohol by volume, about the strength of fortified wine or sake. The drinks also contained 8, 20 or 25 parts per million of dissolved oxygen, which is known to play a role in alcohol breakdown by the body.
It took about 5 hours for the blood alcohol levels of volunteers to reach zero. But Kwon鈥檚 team found that on average, those whose drinks contained 20 or 25 ppm of oxygen went to zero 23 minutes and 27 minutes faster respectively than those who had the lowest-oxygen drinks (Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, ).
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The researchers suggest that enriching alcoholic drinks with oxygen might 鈥渁llow individuals to become sober faster鈥�. 鈥淭he reduced time to a lower blood-alcohol concentration may reduce alcohol-related accidents,鈥� they write.
A spokeswoman for the British Medical Association was unimpressed. 鈥淲e wouldn鈥檛 want a situation where people drank more simply because they would recover quicker.鈥�
