The human body is mysterious, damp place, capable of all sorts of unlikely sounding feats: Terrified mothers lifting cars from atop their trapped children, every day people slurping 18 fertilized duck embryos without hurling positively everywhere...the wonders never cease. So perhaps it shouldn't come as such surprise that one Texas man is capable of brewing beer—in his stomach.
The story goes that the man—a 61-year-old homebrewer who remains unidentified—was finding himself suddenly and perplexing drunk. After church, during church, you know, at times of day when getting drunk really just wasn't the thing to be doing. His wife was understandably peeved. He was confused. From the study:
His wife, who is a nurse, began to document this phenomenon with a DOT approved alcohol breathalyzer. Often his blood alcohol percent was as high as 0.33 to 0.40. The legal limit for alcohol in the United States is 0.08 percent. They could find no correlation to these episodes other than scant ingestion of alcohol such as from a piece of gum with alcohol sugar or a candy with chocolate liqueur as an ingredient. The episodes were more frequent when a meal was missed, after exercise, or when alcohol had been ingested the night before.
So the two took a trip to a gastroenterologist in Lubbock, where a team of medical professionals searched his belongings for illicit booze and locked him in a room for observation. What was happening, it seems, is that the men was suffering ("suffering") from "auto-brewery syndrome," also known as "gut fermentation syndrome," in which a person's stomach converts the yeast from starchy foods into ethanol. Ethanol is alcohol.
The problem ("problem") is easy enough to treat: This man had in his system an overabundance of brewer's yeast, commonly found in comestibles like bread, wine and beer. He was treated with antifungals and a low carbohydrate diet, and the syndrome disappeared.
Is the condition like a superpower, capable of being recalled in times of need? Or is it gone forever, a distant memory relegated to the pages of a study? The study doesn't say, but we choose to believe that he's still out there, somewhere, getting wasted off a bagel.
(h/t The Daily Meal)
