We were having this discussion today. Someone said that most Asians don’t have a certain enzyme to digest alcohol. Is this true? If so, why?
Haven’t there been alcohols in Asia for just as long as in the West?
The enzyme in question is alcohol dehydrogenase.
Damn! You beat me to it!
My friends and I had this discussion a while back. One’s friend g/f is asian, and usually doesn’t have more than one or two drinks to be social. She admitted that she turns red after more than that and gets drunk very fast.
They didn’t believe when I told them the answer, but a quick search on the net proved I was right. People were once again, rather than amazed at my knowledge, grumpy and upset about my arrogance for actually knowing it.
It’s not all Asians, and it seems like people can partially overcome it. But yeah, for a good chunk of people alcohol makes them turn beet red and get very drunk very quickly.
From here, discussing alcohol flush reaction.
The degree of sensitivety to alcohol various in Asians. My wife and all of her family can’t drink. She gets red with a half a drink, and also gets sleepy.
I have no cite but saw on a T.V. documentary that early European settlers fell out with native Americans on one occassion when after a social get together the N.A.s returned home and became ill.
They thought that they had been poisoned but apparently they had some sort of gluten/lactose intolerance and the Europeans had given them milk and bread.
Interesting. I’d never heard of this before.
Can this be the answer to a question I posed quite a while ago on this Board – “Why didn’t native Americans develop wine?” ? I know about pulque and other alcoholic beverages develop4ed in the Americas, but those were laboriously produced and used in small quantities, oten religious ones. Yet the North Americans had Labrusca grapes, and could easily have produced wine in large quantities – something the Europeans did right away (The Vikings named part of North America Vinland, although some have argued they were inspired by berries, not grapes. No matter – the colonists that came along six centuries later used the grapes for wine.) So why no native American Labrusca wine? Maybe alcohol dehydrogenase.
Or perhaps other environmental and social characteristics weren’t right for the development of wine. Perhaps they never juiced and stored fruits in such a way that might lead to fermentation. If fermentation happened, perhaps they never had a reason to try the “spoiled” food, because there was adequate supplies of fresh, uncontaminated water and fruits and vegetables.
I wouldn’t think a propensity to become intoxicated faster is a reason for a population not figuring something out.
Hard to believe that they never had an opportunity to find out – European and Asian cultures did. Fermented fruits and juices happen easily and naturally, and American Indians did keep things in pottery jars (and even watertight woven baskets).
“Never had a reason to try “spoiled” foods because there were adequate supplies…”??? What sort of utopia do you think Americans lived in? They were subject to the same famines and occasional deprivations that everyone else was. They stored foods in caches underground as a hedge against this (the Pilgrims lived through their first winter because they found such troves.)
Remember, we’re talking about huge numbers of people inhaviting an area for many thousands of years. It’s inconceivable to me that they wouldn’t have discovered alcohol many times over. The question is why they didn’t exploit this, as the Europeans did.
Cal, this is exactly the type of response I hoped my WAGging would stimulate. So, what else might be the reason?
Were the effects of alcohol somehow not perceived as being pleasurable? That doesn’t make any sense, because alcohol use is prevalent among Native American populations today. A lot of them seem to be taking pleasure in its effects.
What else?
This might sound strange, but does it have anything to do with the social instability in Europe as opposed to Asia.
Asia was so much more advanced so much earlier than Europe, which leads me to think that maybe the facilities (i.e. access to clean drinking water) were more readily accessible. Whereas, in Europe, didn’t a lot of people drink alcohol because it was safer than water in a lot of places? (or was that just sailors?)
What I’m getting at is, even though Asians had their various spirits, did they drink them as routinely as in Europe? I’m really interested in why this might have developed.
By the way, as with all of the other mentions of red-faced Asian drinkers, my Taiwanese wife is exactly the same. Which is how the conversation got started, at a bar watching bowl games.
Also, is there a difference in the amount of time that it takes to prepare wines from grapes or wheat alcohols than it does to make wine from other fruits like plums or other starches like rice? Perhaps alcohol from grapes or barley are easier to make than alcohol from rice, for example, and thus can be drunk in greater quantities.
Yet, again, maybe it has to do with rice harvesting cultures. I heard Malcolm Gladwell talking recently about why Asians tend to have a much more strict study ethic than westerners. He was saying that since rice farming is a year-round job, wheat farming is more seasonal. So, in Europe, there was a sort of downtime that allowed for more carousal than rice farming would have.
Well, but is there not an enormous list of things that one population figured out but another did not? It’s not as if the whole process is something just lying there waiting to be discovered. There is a certain amount of 2+2=4 inolved, along with the capacity to operationalize the process and transfer the knowledge.
As an example, did the Native Americans have the concept of yeast technology down? I am very ignorant about their diet, so I plan to go read up on it a bit. Nevertheless, my first reaction is “they couldn’t or didn’t figure out” rather than a proscription against intoxication as an explanation for their lack of Miller Lite.
If I remember correctly from the book 1491, the Incans (I think) never developed a usable wheel, even though they had children’s toys with wheels. On the other hand, they had engineered a number of things that didn’t exist in the West. Again, IIRC, European priests called suspension bridges the work of the devil, because they could not figure out how a bridge could stay up without any supports.
This is all to say that, it’s certainly imaginable that this concept extends into fields like yeast technology.
We need to be careful with the concept of “yeast technology” here, too. For thousands of years, people let wine/beer/sake/bread become naturally fermented via environmental yeasts and didn’t know it was something separate from the other ingredients that produced fermented products or rising bread. Commercially-available yeast wasn’t available until (at least, in the US) the late 1800s, and yeast was “added” via the natural airborne method until then.
So it’s not really a matter of availability but rather, did these no- or low-alcohol cultures tend to leave fermentable materials out and available for this to happen? Did they gather honey and dilute it with water, and leave it in jugs? Mix ground barley or wheat with water as a beverage and leave it out? Juice grapes?
I don’t understand this post. I assume in most of these posts, “Asian” really means east Asia. Since civilizations started in what is now the Mid-east and Egypt, and I’ve never heard of an inability to process alcohol as a Semitic condition, I don’t understand. At any rate, the relatively late advent of civilization to western Europe meant there water was probably cleaner there than in cities elsewhere. Certainly the Gauls drank long before the Romans showed up, so I doubt there is a tie in.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. Civilization started fairly early in China and the Indus Valley too. What would the Semitic relationship to alcohol have to to with anything that happened there?
But fermentation is so simple that bears and various types of birds have figured it out – they eat the fermented fruits and get drunk. For people who are already storing food for long periods, fermentation is inevitably going to happen. This is virtually a no-brainer. It’s not as if we’re talking about developing a returning boomerang.
We’re also talking about a common set of operation indulged in by millions of people over many thousands of years. There is absolutely no way that native Americans did not hit upon the idea of fermented liquids, many times over, in many places.
And labrisca grapes ferment as easily and rapidly as European vinifera grapes.