Posted on 02/04/2010 6:31:23 PM PST by SunkenCiv
If your face turns red after drinking just one glass of wine, blame ancient Chinese farmers. Researchers are reporting that the "Asian Flush" mutation cropped up just as rice was first being domesticated, and it may have protected early farmers from the harms of drinking too much. But some other scientists urge caution, saying that the dates may not match up.
When you drink, enzymes in the liver known as alcohol dehydrogenases (ADHs) convert alcohol to an organic compound called acetaldehyde; another enzyme then converts acetaldehyde to acetic acid. But about 50% of Asians and 5% of Europeans have mutations in these enzymes that can increase the rate of alcohol metabolism up to 100-fold. This leads to a rapid accumulation of acetaldehyde, which can cause capillaries in the face to dilate -- and the face to turn red. Other unpleasant symptoms can include nausea and headaches.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenow.sciencemag.org ...
“Alcohol, btw, is a vasodilator, which is why drinking the demon rum and the like makes one feel warm — the capillaries are near the surface, as are most of our nerves. It also means that we’re losing heat, so you get to feel nice and warm as you freeze to death faster (y’know, in a cold climate).”
Yep. Learned that in high altitude cold weather training in the Corps.
Also learned that coffee is a constrictor of said capillaries. Drinking coffee or other caffeine beverages can assist in causing frostbite dmg to fingers, toes and nose but can save your life by keeping more blood in the body core.
That’s why I only drink coffee with whiskey innit. I don’t want to die but want to keep all my parts too.
My sister in law’s ears turn red when she drinks I’ll tell her about this article. Drinking alcohol gives me an instant headache (I don’t mean a hangover the next day) so I have given it all up.
Me too. I get a buzz for about five minutes and then a tree hour headache. LOL
tree s/b three
Have you completely given it up like I have?
I'm positive that I've read articles here at FR stating that the Chinese were not the first to cultivate rice, not by a long shot. I wonder if there are other inaccuracies in this article and in the hypothesis it presents.
To digest the haggis.
Unfortunately, yes, for the most part. It would be nice to have a drink or two now and again. I get a lot of headaches as it is, so my tolerance for any more is limited.
Yangtze River Valley ~ presumably settled by Chinese type people ~ that’s the first area to see cultivation AND domestication of rice. Other areas also cultivated rice, but didn’t domesticate it as soon as the Chinese.
First Rice in China
http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=1031&catid=11&subcatid=73
The Jiahu—a rich but little known archeological site located near the village of Jiahu near the Yellow River in Henan Province in central China—has yielded the oldest known domesticated rice, dated to 7000 B.C. The rice was a kind of short-grained japonica rice. Scholars had previously thought the earliest domesticated rice belonged to the long-grain indica subspecies.
Other early evidence of rice farming comes from a 7000-year-old archeological site near the lower Yangtze River village of Hemudu in Zheijiang Province. When the rice grains were found there they were white but exposure to air turned them black in a matter minutes. These grains can now be seen at a museum in Hemudu. Some 8,000-year-old rice grains have been discovered in Changsa in the Hunan Province.
A team form South Korea's Chungbuk National University announced that it had found the remains of rice grains in the Paleolithic site of Sorori, South Korea, dated to around 12,000 B.C. The discovery challenges the accepted belief that rice was first cultivated in China.
http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=1031&catid=11&subcatid=73
These remains predated anything in Korea by a couple of thousand years.
It is not beyond belief that the cultivation of rice began at a time when a substantial portion of the North American ice sheet still existed, and possibly within sight of almost year around sea ice.
Which sounds almost silly until you realize that the Global Warming that resulted in the melting of the great ice sheets of the last period of glaciation could easily have made the sub-arctic regions around the Bering Straight prime territory for the first stages of East Asian agriculture!
Such a point of origin would explain why American Indian agricultural development is as ancient as East Asian, African or Middle Eastern agricultural development.
Haggis I forgot to mention that.
There’s a link to the more up-to-date info up in the ping massage, er, message.
I have an aspiration to be the first emperor of the Ping Dynasty, btw.
Buzz Beer...
Led Zep hadn’t recorded IV yet.
It is this or similar differences in alcohol metabolism that cause American Indians, and some other peoples to be more succeptible to alcoholism. Apparently if you just drink for a day or two (like on weekends) but then nothing for the right number of days (perhaps during the week)then your body will not go through the changes that develop into alcoholism.
bunch of nonsense.
The condition is also found in Native Americans, who migrated to the Americas before rice was domesticated.
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