Wednesday Facts: you didn't know this yet

Do you get drunk faster when you're menstruating? Good question! And why do people snore more when they have a glass? Another mystery. We are happy to explain these and more musings.

You get drunk faster when you have your period.

It sounds like a fable, but passes for a fact. During the last days of your period, there are fewer hormones in the blood. This means that you can get a higher alcohol concentration in your blood than on other days. As a result, it can happen that you are tipsy or drunk more quickly during the tail end of your period than on other days in your cycle.

Alcohol makes you snore (more).

Are you cutting down a forest after a pleasant evening? Then you are officially a snoring-from-alcohol victim. Alcohol consumption can cause the muscles of the upper airways to relax. The slackening of these muscles causes people to snore (more) after they have been drinking. Alcohol can also cause sleep apnea (= temporary stopping of breathing). That is quite exciting, especially for your partner because they no longer hear breathing. Unless he or she is running a snoring marathon himself, he or she won't notice.

There is no harm in breathing in someone else's smell of alcohol.

You can safely hang over the mouth of your drunk partner/mother/girlfriend/neighbor/tennis teacher/knitting buddy, because it is -unlike smoking- not harmful to inhale someone else's alcohol smell. Alcohol only becomes harmful to your body if you drink more than the appropriate daily amounts. Whether this is advisable to do is an entirely different question.

A glass of (red) wine a day is not healthy for you.

'Drinking a glass of (red) wine a day is healthy for you.' This is often said based on perhaps the most highly cited study on alcohol and health by University of Calgary Paul Ronksley in 2011. But this study was wrong. Firstly, the results only applied to a very limited group of participants: men aged 40 to 50 and women immediately after the menopause, who also ate a very healthy diet. And more importantly: the control group – ie the people who did not drink – turned out to be many ex-alcoholic addicts. Although they no longer drank, they still lived an unhealthy life, had lived an unhealthy life or were on medication that prohibits drinking. That distorted the picture. Then that conviction is immediately eradicated.

Source: alcoholinfo.nl.