On a recent vacation, I had two events involving alcohol in one day. At the afternoon event, I had 3 beers, got somewhat tipsy, but was sober by the time of the evening event.
At the evening event, I had planned to have another 3 beers or so, but was only able to consume one full beer and part of the second before the thought of consuming more alcohol was nauseating to me. I stayed disappointingly sober at the second event.
I have noticed this effect in the past, and I am wondering, what is responsible for it? Is there some lingering component of alcoholic drinks which takes longer for the body to metabolize than the alcohol itself? Or perhaps metabolization of alcohol is a multi-step process, and there are byproducts which induce nausea?
Metabolization of anything is a multi-step process; living beings are immensely complicated in chemical terms. It is also not instantaneous and most of it takes part in the liver, which also has to do many other things: if you’re “loading” the liver with other stuff (such as certain medications), your capacity for alcohol will be reduced. And of course different people have different baseline capacities and capacity changes with age.
