Diet Mixers Get You Drunk Quicker

Here’s an interesting finding on alcohol and diet mixers. Apparently regular mixers (those with sugar) as opposed to diet mixers (those without sugar) cause alcohol to enter your blood slower. For instance, a rum and coke made with diet coke may raise your blood-alcohol levels a lot quicker that the same drink made with regular coke. This suggests that having a few drinks while dieting might get you drunk a little quicker. Depending on your purpose for drinking this could be good or bad but I hope as readers of ‘How To Live A Longer Life’ you would find the overindulgence of alcohol to be less of a good thing.

Sugar Slows Alcohol Absorption

The study that identified this was conducted by Australian researchers who gave men an alcoholic beverage made with an artificially sweetened mixer one day and one made with a don-diet mixer the next day.

Blood-alcohol tests taken on both days revealed that the diet drinks caused more alcohol to be absorbed by the bloodstream, resulting in blood-alcohol levels of .05, versus .03 for drinks made with non-diet mixers. Scientists believe the difference is due to the lack of sugar, which typically slows the rate at which the body processes the drink and absorbs its alcohol.

In my opinion there isn’t too much to read into these findings because this is a trade off. You want your liver to filter alcohol out of your blood stream but to do this more efficiently it would appear you should have a regularly sweetened mixer. In contrast you should avoid excess sugars as they are not nutritionally relevant to your body and they add extra unnecessary calories to your diet. I guess if it were my call I’d stick with taking my drink straight up with no mixer at all… but hey, that’s just me.

For more info Heartstrong recently posted a short summary of the caloric content of various alcoholic drinks. You can make the call on your mixers as you like.

Source
Best Life, Dec-Jan, 2007