Orientals and Alcohol

Upon being offered the traditional one for the road, a Japanese will more likely than not decline with a polite "Kao akaku naru" (My face will get red). If he does accept the drink, he may feel uncomfortable after downing it. In any event, he--like most Asians--will probably never become an alcoholic. That fact has long been a puzzle to hard-drinking Westerners. The difference is often explained away by Oriental cultural or social traditions, like the strong Chinese taboo against public drunkenness. But now a group at the University of North Carolina has given new weight to a more recent explanation: the East-West drinking disparity may be primarily caused by genetic differences.

To check earlier findings by Boston Psychiatrist Peter H. Wolff that Orientals blush more easily in response to alcohol than Westerners, the North Carolina team selected 48 test subjects, 24 Americans of European extraction and 24 Orientals, mostly Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese and Koreans. All of them lived in central North Carolina, mostly around the college town of Chapel Hill, and were modest to moderate drinkers.

Head Pounding. The North Carolina team, led by Psychiatrist John Ewing, gave laboratory cocktails of ginger ale and ethyl alcohol, measuring the amount of alcohol so that each subject drank an amount proportionate to his body weight. The volunteers were then questioned and tested for two hours to gauge the effect of the cocktail. The tests revealed a striking difference. After drinking, the Westerners tended to feel relaxed, confident, alert and happy; the Orientals were more likely to experience muscle weakness, pounding in the head, dizziness and anxiety.

Other test results were equally conclusive. Seventeen of the 24 Orientals became deeply flushed, some within minutes of drinking; that was established visually and by a special device that records pulse pressure of the earlobe. Only three of the Westerners blushed, none as heavily. Blood pressure dropped more sharply and heartbeat quickened more in Orientals than in Westerners. In addition, the alcohol tended to produce a higher level of acetaldehyde, a chemical with anesthetic and antiseptic properties, in the blood of the Oriental subjects. Ewing suspects that the production of this chemical may be partly responsible for the disagreeable reaction that the Orientals experienced.

Ewing's conclusion: "The general level of discomfort in drinking small amounts of alcohol would seem to offer protection to many Orientals from overusing alcoholic beverages as a psychological escape mechanism." He suspects that genetic differences may also account for the drinking habits of other ethnic groups. To check his theory, the North Carolina team has begun carrying out similar tests on blacks, Jews and other groups that tend to use alcohol sparingly.

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