It almost sounds like a Sherlock Holmes case:
A 61-year-old man staggers into a Texas emergency room feeling light-headed, nauseous, and dizzy.
The nurses think he looks kinda hammered, so they give him a Breathalyzer test, and
sure enough, his blood alcohol concentration clocks in at a very drunk .37 percent.
But thing is, the guy claims he hasn’t had a single drink today.
In fact, he says he’s been experiencing sudden and unexplained bouts of drunkenness
for years.
So what’s up?
Is the guy a closet drinker?
Is he suffering some kind of amnesia, or sleep-boozing, or what?
The doctors decide to check the man’s pockets for hidden booze, then monitor him in an isolated
hospital room for 24 hours.
They have him eat a lot of carb-heavy foods while staff take various readings and watch
what happens to his blood alcohol content.
What they eventually find, is that the guy has an over-abundance of brewer’s yeast
in his digestive system, and it’s basically turning his guts into a fermentation vat,
converting carbohydrate sugars into ethanol, and getting him sloshed.
As you’ve probably guessed by now, this story actually happened, back in 2010.
And in the end, the man’s doctors diagnosed him with auto-brewery, or gut fermentation
syndrome.
Basically, his digestive system was turning carbohydrates into alcohol.
Cue the beer belly jokes.…
Here’s what his doctors figured was happening:
When most people eat yeasty foods, the yeast passes right on through their body.
But sometimes it’s possible for that yeast to stick around in larger numbers.
The Texan man’s troubles seem to have started after he completed a hardcore round of antibiotics
that wiped out his good gut bacteria, eliminating the competition and allowing yeasts and other
fungi to take over.
So whenever he'd eat carbohydrates, the extra yeast in his digestive system would start
fermenting those carbs into alcohol, which would end up in his bloodstream.
He was literally getting drunk on bread.
The doctors treated the man by having him take antifungal drugs and probiotics to restore
his good bacteria.
They also had him eat a low-carb diet help to keep the yeast in check.
Now, this wasn't the first-ever case of auto-brewery syndrome.
Some children with short bowel syndrome -- an intestinal condition that makes proper nutrient
absorption difficult -- have also shown signs of extra yeast causing intoxication.
And researchers in Japan have documented similar reports of serious digestive yeast infections
and spontaneous tipsiness, dating back to the 1970s.
Even so, this syndrome is both rare and controversial, because all we have is this handful of mysterious
case studies.
It's just hard to figure out what's actually causing the problem without more research
-- like a controlled clinical trial.
Plus, when it comes to getting drunk without drinking, an over-abundance of yeast may not
be the only factor involved.
There’s also a problem with certain enzymes.
Normally, alcohol gets broken down by particular liver enzymes.
But in some people, genetic mutations mean they don’t produce those enzymes properly.
So they can end up feeling drunk after drinking a relatively small amount of alcohol.
This mutation affects a disproportionate number of Asian people -- about one in three, which
could help explain why Japan has the highest number of reported gut fermentation syndrome
cases.
Combine extra yeast with a rice-heavy diet and abnormal enzymes and you might find yourself
getting accidentally sauced as those carbohydrates turn to ethanol that doesn’t get processed
quickly enough.
It's pretty easy to test for these enzyme deficiencies, but so far there’s no definitive
test for auto-brewery syndrome in people with the usual enzymes.
Since it’s so difficult to clearly diagnose, it would be hard for researchers to set up
studies and trials.
So, until there’s a better way to diagnose it, auto-brewery syndrome is a condition that
will probably continue to be rare and mysterious.
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