Kudzu Helps Curb Binge Drinking

jeepliberty writes "CNN has a story that the invasive ground cover vegetation Kudzu is being tested to curb binge alcohol drinking. In the health story posted Monday, researchers at the Harvard-affiliated McClean Hospital in Boston stated that volunteers who were given kudzu drank about 50% less beer in a 90-minute period than the group that was given a plecebo. The kudzu group got just an intoxicated."

Comments

This just in...

[TripMaster Monkey]

Here's a quote from the Internet Health Library:

...both the roots and flowers of kudzu, Radix and Flos puerariae, respectively, have been used to treat alcohol abuse safely and effectively in China for more than a millennium.

Next on CNN, researchers have determined that the sun rises in the east.

The cure may be worse than the disease.

[hey!]

I recently read a book about nutrition by Dr. Willet of the Harvard School of Public Health in which he discusses the effects of alcohol consumption on overall mortality rate.

Alcohol has a prophylactic effect against heart disease (and stroke? I'm not sure if I remember this correctly). If you plot mortality rates against drinks per day, people who have one to two drinks a day have a lower mortality rate than people who drink either less or more.

It gets really interesting when you disaggregate the data by type of mortality. As people drink more, their chance of dying from things like heart disease continue to drop. The marginal effect is still pretty dramatic at three or even four drinks. However, above one drink per day deaths from accidents starts to rise extremely rapidly.

So -- we may have a medicine here that is worse than the disease.

You get just as impaired after one to two drinks as you do after three or four, so you have the same chance of doing something boneheaded and killing yourself. However, you don't get the cardiovascular benefits.

Re:Not so sure

[swillden]

So instead of having 2 beers in 2 hours and driving safely home I could have 2 beers in 2 hours and get a DUI?

Since it enhances the effects, you could have one beer in two hours and feel and act the same as if you'd had two. So a breathalyzer or blood test would show a lower level of alcohol relative to the amount of impairment. If kudzu use becomes widespread we may have to adjust the legal BAC limits, or test for the kudzu-derived compound.

On the other hand, since you've consumed less alcohol, and presumably the kudzu doesn't change the rate at which you metabolize the alcohol, your level of impairment should decline much faster. So as long as you can wait long enough to metabolize most of a beer before driving, you should be even less impaired than if you'd had two beers and no kudzu.

Looking at it that way, it sounds like kudzu+alcohol is to alcohol as crack is to cocaine... it intensifies the effects of the underlying drug, thereby reducing the amount needed and shortening the "high". I have to wonder if that's really a good thing! Luckily, alcohol is much less addictive than cocaine.

Disclaimer: this comment is from a non-drinker who has no firsthand knowledge of the effects of alcohol.