HYSTERIA ALERT: Human Blood Still Has More Alcohol than Soda

Posted by on June 28th, 2012


The UK’s Daily Mail is breathlessly reporting that leading soft drinks including Coca-Cola and Pepsi contain trace amounts of alcohol. What ramifications should this have for teetotallers and people who abstain for drinking for religious reasons? Um, none.

While the Daily Mail points out that the soft drinks contain about .001 percent alcohol, they forgot to mention that your body naturally already has about .004 percent alcohol. This is because those wonderful bacteria that live in our gut and help us digest food and live, sometimes like to ferment (Endogenous ethanol production).

The article was taken from a French publication called ‘60 Million Consumers’ so we can’t tell if they missed that important detail either.

So to put it in simple terms, since Coca-Cola has less alcohol than your bloodstream, assuming that it all went to your blood (instead of getting digested, which is what happens) .001 is less than .004 – so drinking cola will actually lower your body’s natural level of alcohol. It makes you less alcoholic.

If you’re looking to get drunk off cola, you’d be better of drinking human blood. Um, forget we said that. Do not drink human blood.

People will likely ignore this. We’ll get more soda hysteria. Orange juice has more sugar and dissolves teeth too (and fangs).

Check out the Straight Dope if this naturally produced alcohol can get you buzzed…

One Response to “HYSTERIA ALERT: Human Blood Still Has More Alcohol than Soda”

  1. Penguin Empire Says:
    June 29th, 2012 at 7:32 pm

    I don’t think that adding .001% EtOH of x volume of soda will lower the .004% EtOH of x volume of blood when added to it. If .001% of alcohol in a bottle soda is, say, .01mL when you add that to the, say, .04mL of alcohol in your blood you will get .05mL of alcohol in your blood (assuming, like you said, if it didn’t just get digested). So technically it would add to the levels since you are adding more alcohol.