Question: Does coffee help you sober up after drinking alcohol?
You may have heard you can drink coffee or take a cold shower to sober up from drinking alcohol, but does it really help? Here's the scientific answer and explanation:
Answer: The
answer to this question is a qualified "no". Blood alcohol level
doesn't diminish, but you might feel more awake from drinking coffee.
Your
body takes a certain amount of time to metabolize alcohol. Drinking
coffee does not reduce recovery time time, which is dependent on the
quantity of the enzymes alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde
dehydrogenase. You cannot make these enzymes more abundant or more
effective by drinking coffee.
However, coffee contains caffeine,
which acts as a stimulant, while alcohol is a central nervous system
depressant. Although you will be intoxicated until your body metabolizes
the alcohol, the caffeine can serve to wake you up. So, you're still
drunk, but not as sleepy. Worse, judgement remains impaired, so an
intoxicated person may feel recovered enough to perform risky tasks,
like operating a motorized vehicle.
Caffeine and the Effects of Alcohol Over Time
Caffeine isn't
going to make a big difference in how awake you feel early on while
drinking. For the first hour and a half after drinking alcohol, blood
alcohol levels rise and people actually feel more alert than before.
Drinkers don't feel sleepy until 2 to 6 hours after drinking. This is
when you're most likely to reach for the coffee as a pick-me-up.
Caffeine takes about half an hour to hit your system, so the impact on
your wakefulness is delayed, not an immediate reaction to drinking a cup
of joe. As you would expect, decaf isn't going to have much of an
effect, one way or the other, except to help replenish fluid lost from
the dehydrating effect of alcohol. Caffeine or any stimulant dehydrates
you, but full-strength coffee doesn't really worsen the effect from
drinking alcohol.
Experiments on Whether Coffee Sobers You Up
Even
if your metabolism is faster, experiments have shown that even after
several cups of coffee, caffeinated drunks don't fare better than their
intoxicated, uncaffeinated counterparts. There doesn't seem to be any
shortage of volunteers willing to drink alcohol and coffee for science,
either. The Mythbusters team performed eye-hand coordination tests, had a
couple of rounds, performed tasks, and then tested reactions again
after several cups of coffee. Their small study indicated coffee did not help eye-hand coordination.
The
effects of caffeine on intoxication aren't limited to humans, Danielle
Gulick, PhD, now of Dartmouth College, examined how well young adult
mice were able to navigate a maze, comparing a group injected with
different amounts alcohol and caffeine versus a control group injected
with saline. While the drunk and sometimes caffeinated mice moved around
more than their sober counterparts and were more relaxed, they did not
complete the maze as well. The drunk mice, with or without caffeine, did
not exhibit anxious behavior. They explored the maze just fine, but
they were not able to figure out how to avoid parts of the maze that had
bright lights or loud noises. While the study doesn't say, it's
possible the mice simply didn't mind those things while intoxicated. In
any case, caffeine did not alter mice behavior, compared with how they
acted when exposed to alcohol alone.
The Danger of Drinking Coffee If You're Drunk
One dangerous effect of drinking coffee while intoxicated is that the person under the influence thinks he is more sober than he was pre-coffee. Thomas Gould, PhD, of Temple University, published a study in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience that
concluded people associate feeling tired with being intoxicated. If
they aren't sleepy, they may not recognize they are still intoxicated.
Not
all research is so clear-cut. Studies have been conducted on the effect
of drinking coffee on the driving ability of intoxicated subjects (no,
the drunk drivers weren't out on public roads). Results to date have
been mixed. In some cases, coffee seemed to partially reverse the
sedative effect of alcohol, leading to an improvement in reaction time. In other tests, coffee did not improve driving performance.
You may also enjoy reading Why Coffee Makes (Some) People Poop
source: about.com
