K2D - um, drinking water does not add water to the blood stream.
Your blood flows through the kidneys and is cleaned by them. Can you explain why the amount of water that you drink would change how quickly the blood flows through your kidneys?
From my experience (taking urine specimins from convicts for 14 years), drinking lots of water gave a watered down specimin that still tested positive for whatever substance that it had in it. Drinking vinegar made them throw up before giving the specimin that would evenutally test positive.
Note, that the medical professional said 'nope, doesn’t work.
This fly’s in the face of common sense, cite please.
Agreed but irrelevant
maybe, if the heart pumps more blood if there is more blood to pump, but again irrelevant. You seem to be missing my point. I’m not saying you body processes alcohol faster if you drink water, I’m saying it will dilute the alcohol in you blood and the percent alcohol will go down.
This is exactly what I’m saying, why won’t this work for alcohol?
Let’s see if I got this right. Your kidneys respond to the concentration of solutes (osmolality) in the blood and the amount of blood that goes through them (perfusion). So as the water is absorbed from your GI tract the small decreases in the concentration of the stuff in the blood will cause the kidneys to excrete more water. The only way to “dilute” anything in the blood would be to dilute everything in the blood, which the kidneys are pretty good at preventing. So out goes the water. Also, ethenol (and caffeine) inhibit the hormone (ADH) that causes the final concentration step in the kidneys so you’re actually forcing the body to loose fluid/volume, and can become dehydrated (considered to be part of the cause of the hangover).
Although, increasing blood volume would increase the amount of fluid flowing throught he kidneys and increase the rate of stuff being filtered out, so I suppose it should help you clear the stuff that way.
I do wish they sold the synthetic ADH OTC so I could drink alcohol and drink water like a fish and not pee so much.
K2Dave drinking more water will make you pee quicker. The alcohol itself also does this and dehydrates your body. So, you end up peeing quite a bit more, the color of the urine will be lighter and more watery, but it won’t speed up the amount of time it takes for your body to process the alcohol. You can add more detergent to your washing machine, but it won’t change how long the cycle takes.
agreed but again you are missing my point. What I’m saying is adding water to your blood will lower your percentage of alcohol in your blood even if the actual amount of alcohol is unchanged
But not in any clinically significant way. It won’t sober you up, and it won’t drop your BAC enough to measure. And if it makes no difference, why do it?
Drinking water honestly does not dilute out your blood. Other posters have tried to explain this to you, but let me take a crack. First, your intravascular volume (the total volume of your blood-about 6 liters) is not like a partially filled tank. You cannot substantially increase this volume by drinking excess water. There is some extra capacitance built into the system, but not that much. As already metioned, the kidneys remove the excess water lickety-split. In the process, though, the kidneys perform a very fancy trick. They separate the water (which you don’t need) from salts and proteins in the blood, throw out the water, and return the salts and water to the circulation. The kidneys do this very rapidly and it takes a herculean effort to greatly exceed their capacity by simply drinking.
That being said, we can easily exceed the kidneys’ capacity by running some big IV’s into you. Let’s see what would happen. If we ran saline (preferred over water by 4 out of 5 MD’s as an IV fluid) really fast into your bloodstream (let’s say we run in 6 liters in 10 minutes), the first distressing symptom you’d experience is severe shortness of breath. This occurs because we’ve exceeded the capacitance of the vascular system and have completely overwhelmed the kidneys. The extra fluid must go someplace. One of those someplaces will be your lungs, a condition termed pulmonary edema. Sure it’ll go elsewhere, too. Your belly and legs mostly. But trust me, that won’t bother you nearly as much as the extra fluid in your lungs.
drinking water while drinking alcohol is a good idea and will help alleviate your hangover later on. taking massive doses of B-complex vitamins also helps relieve the hangover. NEITHER of these will “bring you down” fast, slow, or otherwise.
If you smoke too much marijuana and would like to feel a little more in control eat some sweets. Candy is especially good. Don’t know how this works exactly, but it does at least feel like it “brings you down.” this method is recommended by the Dutch government for tourists who over-toke while visiting coffeeshops.
A trip to I.H.O.P., Denny’s, the local late night pizza joint or dinner will also help you sober up. Well it won’t actually, but at least you’ll be fed.
Couple of pointers:
In your eagerness to get food, don’t drive over the sidewalk into the parking lot.
You may want to avoid the diner off Union Square that also serves alchohol as well as pancakes into the wee hours of the morning.
