Alcohol

People will always tell you to eat along with your alcohol. This is because information that everybody already knows is the best to put on your website. No reason not to, after all. Except that it clogs up the internet, and there isn't any room left for new information, like the Icelandic Muslim question.

So, food and alcohol. When these people and websites tell you to eat at your party, they always say that food "soaks up" the alcohol. Sometimes they go the extra mile, and tell you to eat a lot of starch to soak up the alcohol. Sometimes even very official sources talk about it this way. I don't know why. They never elaborate. Is the popcorn in question really supposed to soak up alcohol? It gets pretty saturated as soon as you stick it in your mouth. Most food is saturated even before that. Even if it did absorb alcohol, the whole complex gets broken up in your intestines.

I suspect, although they are covering their tracks well, that everyone is really thinking of the activated charcoal they give people who have alcohol poisoning (or other drugs). Charcoal really does absorb the alcohol, resist digestion, and just pass it out of the body. But it's nothing like food.

Second, why the cataclysmic warnings about drinking on an empty stomach? Yes, if you drink without eating, you will have a higher BAC than if, all things equal, you had eaten. So? That is not unalloyed bad. People drink to elevate their blood alcohol concentration. If it gets too high, that is bad, but it would be bad whether you had eaten or not. Medical websites should just tell you to drink more slowly if you're not eating, and leave the rest up to your discretion. One thing they never do mention, but which is a large problem, is that if you drink on a very empty stomach you will get a stomachache. Maybe stomachaches aren't earthshaking enough for the doctors to worry about, but man do they hurt.

"The only thing that can sober you up is time" is another old chestnut. I wouldn't mind this one so much -- it's mostly true -- except they repeat it so religiously. Sometimes they italicize only. If they think they didn't make themselves clear, they go on to tell you that black coffee cannot make you more sober. But coffee can make you more sober, can't it? Intoxication/sobriety is a measure of how well you can function. If you are intoxicated, you can't do things well. One symptom of alcohol intoxication is sleepiness. If you drink lots of coffee, you become less sleepy. Hence, more sober. Right?

I don't want to say that coffee can make you completely sober, because of course it can't. But when alcohol foes start acting like the king of the universals, and throwing around words like only, then it becomes my business.