The+Guide+to+Drinking

(Please drink responsibly)

Dr. French used me as example in class today. He said I could do 60 shots of beer in one hour and only have a BAC of 10 I think. As someone that has done this game (though long ago), I can assure you that I felt much drunker than this. So I thought it was worth taking a look at.

Ok so it was bugging me and I had to figure out what was wrong. 1) option 1, He used 65% of my mass to estimate total body water. I figured hey that can't be right for everyone. And had a very meat headed moment when I said "I work out, I've gott to have more water in me than that." So I researched it and found that muscle has about 75% water. good so far. Read a little more and found that Total body water can be found by taking lean body mass times 72.4%. So I think I've solved the discrepancy. So I did the numbers using 11% as my body fat percentage. And I came up with me being 64.44% water. Hmm...strike one for AJ, +1 for Dr. French.

2) Ok so it my TBW that was the problem. Though this does vary according to body fat and was accounted for. So what else could it be. So I thought hmm 3.2% beer is done by weight. And 5% beer is done by volume. There has to be a difference. There is 3.2% veer by weight is about 4% beer by volume, so its not as different as I thought it was. So maybe Dr. French screwed up when he figured 4 g/oz for the beer. So I did the calculations and I missed again. 4 g/oz is just about 5% alcohol by volume. Strike 2 for me.

3) Next thought was that maybe I'm on the low end of alcohol metabolism. So I did calculations to account for 7-12 g of etoh clearance/hour. Ya that didn't affect much so strike 3 for me and I decide I may actually study tonight.

4) So about this time I start thinking to myself that i'm a light weight and can't really hold my liquor. Which really is still a possibility. So the alcohol content was right, the TBW was right. the only other thing that could mess with the calculations is drinking less than I really did. so i looked up what a shot was. google it and you will find that 1.5 oz is usually the accepted amount. Ah ha, so I didn't drink 60 oz (5 beers) I drank 90 oz (7.5 beers). So I ran the number again. And found that my BAC would be closer to 0.16. which for those of you still paying attention at home is not 16% but 0.16%. OK, so I decided to play with different things in the equation.

I changed my weight (btw I weight 94 kg, but 100 was a round number to use in class) I got fatter and leaner I changed the type of beer I drank. Nothing like 40 to get the blood flowing, which is close to an IPA Tyler I did shots I tried to relive my college days, which was very similar to second look day in May, how bout another Irish Car Bomb S R-W? I had some wine I got heavy and anorexic. I figured out how much I could drink in an hour and in 3 hours and still "legally" drive How long does it take to drink a 6 pack and still be able to drive. And finally I decided what it would be like to do 21 shots in 6 hours. Its about the same as anesthesia, but not quite to the point of coma.

So since I killed a couple hours playing with this I decided to share it with my class. If you want easier ways to do this there are links on the 2nd sheet of the excel document.

AJ