Remember how Doug was petrified of eating liver and onions?

Happy Monday!

I am struggling a little today – I’m getting sick. Blah. I’m sick from a bug or sinuses or something, but after talking to a bunch of you this morning it seems like the good chuck of you are still a little hung-over from this weekend. I linked to a post in the past about how alcohol works in your body so today I’m going to tell you how your liver deals with you and your drunkie face habits.

Flashback to Saturday night and that shot of tequila you took (ugh, my stomach just cringed). The alcohol in that shot just rushed down into your stomach where it is already being absorbed into the bloodstream. Some alcohol can be excreted from your body via sweat and urine, but the vast amount (~98%) needs to get dealt with in your liver.

The liver is such a great organ. It’s huge. It weighs almost 3 pounds. You can also cut out 75% of your liver and it will fully regenerate itself.

So yeah, the alcohol is now in your blood and on its way to your liver. It will enter your liver through the large portal vein. The blood in the vein is stoked full of stuff absorbed from the pancreas, stomach and intestines – really nasty blood. This blood mixes with some other blood that contains oxygen and moves through little channels (sinusoids).



Now you need to do some visualization. The central vein is the center of a hexagon of liver cells (hepatocytes). The liver is made up of lots of these hexagons (hepatic lobules). Each lobule is surrounded by other lobules and at the corner of each is an artery, bile duct and another vein (the portal triad). The blood with all the tequila comes into the liver via the vein in the portal triad. Then it pours out of the sinusoids and begins to move through the liver cells. As it moves through the cells, the alcohol is removed with the help of some enzymes found in the liver cells. The filtered blood then reaches the central vein where it pools and exits the liver.

Every time a molecule of alcohol comes in contact with a liver cell, it meets an enzyme (alcohol dehydrogenase) that breaks it down into another chemical (acetaldehyde). This chemical is toxic to the body so it gets broken down again by another enzyme (acetaldehyde dehydrogenase) into yet another chemical (acetate), which will ultimately be turned into carbon dioxide and water. There are only so many enzymes to go around, so the liver may need a few rounds before it can process all of your shots. There is another way your body can process alcohol, but it’s not used as commonly and I don’t feel like explaining it. This paragraph is not that bad if you read it without the words in parenthesizes.

Now think about that this Friday night while you’re downing free drinks from 11 to midnight at Cobalt.