Could you imagine ? your sitting at home, enjoying a cozy night with
your family watching TV , and all of the sudden your drunk ! Sounds odd, silly,
and more of a joke if anything right ? well it does, however for one 61 year
old man from Texas, a self confessed
home brewer, this was his daily reality.
The 61 year old home brewer
stumbled his way into an Emergency room in Texas. He was complaining of
dizziness. Given that the man seemed somewhat intoxicated, the nurses ran a
breathalyzer test. Sure enough the man was well over the legal alcohol limit,
sporting an alcohol blood percentage of .37 ! For those of you not familiar
with this system, here's an example. In Vancouver Canada the legal limit for
alcohol, is .05, and .02 in Germany. Safe to say this man was drunk.
The one thing that did not
make sense here, is the man claimed he had not touched a single drop of alcohol
that day. Rather hard to believe. "He would get drunk out of the blue — on
a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime," Barabara Cordell, the dean of nursing at
Panola College in Carthage, Texas has shared "His wife was so dismayed
about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer.".
So here we have it, a group of people concerned about a man's supposed
drinking problem, and the man himself confesses to not having one.
Most medical professionals
who heard about this, merely wrote the man and the case off as one of closet
alcoholism. To them it seemed a pretty
open and shut case, regardless of the fact the man in question denied the
allegations. Luckily for this man Cordell, and Dr. Justin McCarthy, gastroenterologist
in Lubbock, weren't willing to write the case of just yet. They wanted to get
to truth of what was actually going on.
In the end it was discovered,
that this man had an over abundance of brewers yeast in his digestive track.
Essentially giving it the ability for him to produce ethanol in his own gut.
His digestive track was infected with saccharomyces cerevisiae, which when
introduced to foods with carbohydrates; pasta, a bagel, bread, soda pop, or
things of this nature, the sugars present would then be fermented into ethanol
alcohol, and then the man would get drunk.
To test the hypothesis, they
kept him in a closed room for 24 hours, while during he ate carb rich foods.
They would then test his blood alcohol levels; at one point it spiked .12
percent in an extremely short period of time. Thus validating what the man had
been saying all along. They coined the syndrome as "auto-brewing"
syndrome, and have written about it in
the International Clinical Journal of Medicine, since the case.
Through a low carb diet, and
anti fungal medications the man was able to beat, and overcome the syndrome. He
is now able to enjoy a bagel without the worry of getting intoxicated ! I
definitely think that this story can be categorized as an odd, strange, and
weird tale. If you want to have ethanol present in your system, best to take it
from external sources I would say, for this syndrome does not sound fun to me.
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