A 61-year-old Texas man was turned away from an emergency room after telling them that he was drunk without actually drinking any alcohol. Authorities dismissed him as a batty drunkard after he registered a 0.37 blood alcohol count (nearly five times the legal driving limit in Texas) following a breathalyzer test. They assumed he was a closet drunk yet he insisted that he had not been drinking.
Get this, he was telling the truth. It was his own body producing the booze. Can you imagine what those hangovers must have been like? Eventually some medical professionals took on his case and made some bizarre discoveries after isolating the man for testing.
Via The Huffington Post:
During the isolation, the man ate carbohydrate-rich foods and ended up with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.12 percent. The man’s belly was brewing booze due to a buildup of Saccharomyces cerevisiae — a common yeast — in his gut, Cordell discovered. When he ate or drank starch-heavy foods, including bagels, pasta and soda, the yeast in his belly fermented the sugars into ethanol.
NPR reports that the rare buildup can happen after patients take antibiotics. Killing all the bacteria in one’s stomach paves the way for yeast the grow and thrive. Another contributing factor may have been his home-brewery, which would have required the man to keep plenty of live yeast around, according to Business Insider.
The man was treated with anti-fungal medicine and a low-carb diet.
