How Your Gut Can Homebrew Alcohol & Get You Drunk

…and other items from this week’s health news:

Trouble is brewing… But how?

Did you know it’s possible to get drunk without ingesting alcohol? It can happen that gut microbes ferment carbohydrates into ethanol, raising blood alcohol levels high enough to cause intoxication without drinking.

This is called “auto-brewery syndrome” (ABS).

While it’s not considered a common condition, we don’t yet know just how prevalent it is, since it’s likely underdiagnosed due to low awareness, stigma, and the difficulty of confirming the diagnosis under supervised conditions.

It’s further complicated by the fact that almost everyone has the same process happening in their gut, just usually at a subclinical level, because while those certain gut bacteria* convert sugars into ethanol via fermentation pathways, ABS patients generate much higher levels that enter the bloodstream.

*And yes, analyses identified bacterial species—rather than yeasts—as important contributors in many patients. For example, bacteria Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae were high on the list.

Researchers (Dr. Elizabeth Hohmann et al.) have been looking into this; she and her team compared 22 ABS patients, 21 unaffected household partners, and 22 healthy controls, analyzing gut microbial composition and function.

What she and her team found is that targeting microbial enzymes involved in ethanol production may be more effective than focusing on eliminating specific bacterial species:

Read in full: Auto-brewery syndrome: What causes some people’s gut microbes to produce high alcohol levels?

Related: Stop Sabotaging Your Gut

More reasons to enjoy almonds

In few words: a daily handful of almonds can improve lipid profiles, especially when replacing less healthy snack.

How? The researchers (whose work we’ll cite in a moment) hypothesize that it’s a matter of reduced intestinal cholesterol absorption due to fiber and phytosterols, altered liver cholesterol metabolism from almonds’ abundant healthy unsaturated fats, and indirect benefits via appetite and body composition (the macros profile of almonds is very good for this).

We’ve written about this before (link in the “related” below), but at the time we just had a handful of RCTs, so it’s nice to see a big meta-analysis of 36 randomized controlled trials including 2,485 adults aged 18–66 with mixed cardiometabolic health status.

What they found:

• For lipids overall: there were consistent reductions in total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, non-HDL cholesterol, lipid ratios, apolipoprotein B, and the apolipoprotein B to apolipoprotein A ratio.
• For LDL (“bad”) cholesterol specifically, in numbers: average reduction of about 5 mg/dL overall, with larger reductions of nearly 9 mg/dL in participants starting with elevated LDL cholesterol.

Notably, the benefits were “modest but significant” across the board, so this is definitely an intervention that supports, rather than replaces, other cholesterol-managing strategies:

Read in full: A handful of almonds a day nudges cholesterol the right way

Related: What 47 Almonds Can Do For your Gut, Heart, Skin, & more

Surgical Facemasks are inadequate

A group of clinicians and scientists have urged the World Health Organization to update WHO infection prevention and control guidelines, saying that surgical face masks provide inadequate protection against airborne respiratory infections such as COVID-19 and influenza of various kinds, and should be replaced with respirator-level masks meeting N95 standards should be worn whenever healthcare workers are face to face with patients, rather than reserving them for select situations.

This is because surgical masks fit loosely and were designed to prevent splashes and droplets from surgeons/clinicians, not to block inhalation of airborne pathogens, whereas respirators seal to the face and filter fine particles.

In terms of science, laboratory filtration studies showing surgical masks block roughly 40% of COVID-sized particles, compared with about 80–98% for respirators.

One of the organizers of the initiative, Dr. Adam Finkel, said the difference is like “falling off a wall of four inches rather than four feet”—in other words, there’s a large relative risk reduction even if protection is not absolute.

Read in full: Face masks “inadequate” and should be swapped for respirators, WHO is advised

Related: Mythbusting The Mask Debate

Take care!