Daniel BuenoWho is better at resisting the effects of alcohol: men or women? It depends on the drink. In a test conducted in Rio de Janeiro with 20 volunteers (10 men and 10 women, ages 21 to 54), when the men drank hard liquor – whisky and cachaça –their blood alcohol levels rose faster than when they drank fermented beverages. In women, beer produced the lowest blood alcohol levels during the six hours of the experiment, and cachaça led to much lower blood alcohol levels than did wine. Whisky caused the highest blood alcohol levels in both genders. The same dose of ethanol (0.5 gram per kilogram of body weight) was offered to each participant (Food Chemistry, September 2014). The study was conducted by Luciana Nogueira from the Rio de Janeiro Federal Institute for Education, Science, and Technology (IFRJ), in collaboration with researchers from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and the University of Campinas (Unicamp). The participants could volunteer to test each of the drinks (beer, wine, whisky, and cachaça), with a one-week interval between tests. In each test, the first blood sample (8 milliliters) was collected after a 12-hour overnight fast. The participants then had half an hour to consume the standard dose of alcohol according to each type of drink, followed immediately by a second blood sampling. After that, additional samples were collected at one-hour intervals over a six-hour period. After they peak, the alcohol concentrations in the bloodstream return slowly to normal, according to the type of drink consumed.
