How Long Does Alcohol Stay in Your System

The effects of alcohol intoxication are known to most of us - either through common knowledge, or through experience! Alcohol, to a certain extent, affect only speech and gait, making you sound funny and walk weird. However, over-consumption of alcohol can lead to more serious effects on the body. Alcohol can be called a system-suppressor, since it impairs judgment, coordination, vision and reaction time, and increases drowsiness.

If you are planning to go to your friend's place for a booze party, you might want to know how long the alcohol is going to stay in your system, especially if you plan to drive back home. This article will help you know just that. Before we begin, let's try to understand what is blood alcohol content, or BAC.

Understanding Blood Alcohol Content

Blood alcohol content is the measure of percent of alcohol in your bloodstream. When a person has eight parts alcohol per 10,000 parts blood in the body then the BAC is said to be 0.08%. These levels can be detected by breath, blood, or urine tests, and are mostly used for legal or medical purposes. However many factors affect the BAC in different people, like weight, gender, amount of alcohol consumed, and time since it was last consumed. BAC can also give an idea about how long your system takes to flush out all the alcohol you consumed (this is done by calculating the BAC periodically, for example every 30 minutes or every hour).

How Long Does Alcohol Stay in Your System

Alcohol is eliminated from the system by a combination of different processes such as metabolism, excretion, and evaporation. While up to 10% of the alcohol is excreted through urine and nearly 1% evaporates through breath, most of the alcohol in your system is metabolized in the liver. A small proportion of alcohol is also excreted through the sweat and tears. An ounce of alcohol is usually not detectable after one to three hours. However, there are many factors which can regulate the time alcohol stays in your system.

Gender: Whether women like it or not, alcohol stays in their system longer than it does in that of a man. This isn't a meaningless gender "bias", but simply a fact; since women have lesser percentage of water in their system (49) as compared to men (58), they will require lesser amount of alcohol to reach a certain BAC reading than men would to reach the same BAC reading.

Weight: Your weight can be a controlling factor. One ounce of alcohol will have a greater effect on a 100-pound female than it will on a 300-pound woman.

Age: Although not very clearly understood, it has been observe that people below 25 years of age cannot metabolize alcohol as fast as older people can. (This may have been a consideration before the minimum drinking age limit was set by different countries all over the world.)

How many drinks you had: Alcohol metabolism depends largely on the functioning of the liver. Most substances are removed from your system at a rate determined by their concentration in your system; i.e. if substance A is present in your system at a higher concentration that substance B, A will be removed from your system faster than B. However, the case is different with alcohol. Alcohol is metabolized by certain enzymes in the liver. These enzymes work at a fixed rate. Hence, after a certain upper limit, the rate of alcohol removal from the system cannot be further increased. In such a case, the alcohol gets stored in the blood and can lead to poisoning.

How much time has elapsed since your first drink: The fact that the enzymes responsible for metabolizing alcohol cannot exceed a fixed upper rate helps us understand the fact that - BAC level will be lower, if more time has elapsed since your last drink, than if less time has elapsed since your last drink. For example, the BAC level of your system will be much lower if measured 4 hours after a drinking party, than if measured only 2 hours after the party.

Other factors: Whether a person is on any form of medication can also affect his/her rate of alcohol detoxification. Aspirin, paracetamol and pyrazole compounds (among other medications) are known to slowdown the rate of alcohol detoxification. Apart from that, even ethnicity of a person is said to affect the rate of alcohol detoxification; East Asians, for example, have more severe hangovers that last longer.

Other random factors include the amount of alcohol consumed, the kind of alcoholic drink consumed (a vodka cocktail, or neat vodka), whether the alcohol was consumed along with food or on an empty stomach, whether the food consumed with the alcohol was protein-rich or not, etc.

How to Suppress the BAC Rate

Controlling the BAC rate and speeding up the body's metabolism to relieve the body of alcohol can be achieved with these tips.

• Eat protein rich food along with alcohol. This tends to slow down the absorption of drink (as explained below).
• Avoid gulping the entire drink; take longer to finish your drink.
• Drink wine or beer which contain moderate amounts of alcohol.
• Avoid drinking contests.
• Drink moderately and occasionally and take juices, ice water and beverages in between.
• Being active helps in controlling the BAC rate.
• Consult a physician in case you are going to undergo a drug test later.

Few people have a wrong concept that if you eat before you start drinking, alcohol metabolism speeds up. This isn't so. Alcohol metabolism, in fact begins the minute you take the first sip of your drink, and continues to occur at a fixed rate. However, eating before you start drinking can help alcohol metabolism in other ways. If you drink on a full-stomach, the absorption rate of alcohol is greatly diminished, so that the total time required to absorb a fixed quantity of alcohol is increased. This in turn, will prevent you from getting a hangover. Also non-carbonated alcohol is absorbed at a slower rate than carbonated alcohol (so beer is absorbed faster, while vodka taken with water will be absorbed slower).

As a final word of advice I will say: if you like consuming alcohol, that's fine. However, be responsible enough to not let your drinking affect the health and/or life of other people around, for that is simply irresponsible and absolutely unnecessary. Do not drink and drive, even if it was just one pint of beer, or just a couple of cocktails. Educate yourself and your friends, and play safe.