It’s time to start putting that beer belly to use. All you need is an incredibly rare yeast infection, and you can start brewing beer in your stomach.
The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae [brewers yeast], Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch — a bagel, pasta or even a soda — the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy reported the case of “auto-brewery syndrome” a few months ago in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.
While “auto-brewery syndrome” sounds like the greatest health problem of all time, the man in question went to the hospital with a 0.37 BAC without touching a drop of alcohol. That’s all of the downsides of drinking with none of the upside.
Going through life with a spontaneous buzz might be nice, but until the hospital isolated him for 24 hours, everyone just assumed he was a closet alcoholic. No one wants to hang out with the guy sneaking a sip of booze under the table at Denny’s.
via NPR