Home Today's Reason to Drink October 9: Curious Events Day

October 9: Curious Events Day

It’s Curious Events Day. It’s a real thing. And here’s an event a lot of my out-of-town friends get real curious about when they drink in Denver: Why do they get so drunk so fast? Like they’re high school kids chugging their first bottle of Mad Dog. I tell them it’s because they’re drinking at altitude and they’re always like, “But why? Why would being higher up make you get drunk faster? You’re closer to God and farther from Satan, you’d think it’d be the other way around.” Well, let me lay some science down. It’s all about oxygen. Your body needs oxygen to metabolize alcohol. Your liver combines the two to produce water and CO2, thus ridding the joy juice from your system. At higher altitudes, where the air is thinner and oxygen less readily available, the unmetabolized alcohol tends to hang around longer. And if that is true, the inverse must be true as well, right? It is. When we high-altitude drinkers slide down to sea-level bars, our oxygen-efficient systems allow us to metabolize alcohol much faster, which is why Rocky Mountain drinkers find it a Herculean task to get drunk in the flatlands. I mean, it’s like being Superman. And to think that all that time we thought we were just lolly-gagging around Denver bars we were actually in training to become our nation’s finest drinkers.

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