10 Surprising Facts You Didn’t Know About Alcohol

People have been making alcohol for a very long time. The oldest known recipe was found on a Sumerian tablet that's almost 4,000 years old. It explains how to brew beer.

In some ancient cultures, though not in Jewish tradition, getting drunk was even admired. In Egypt, for example, it was common to give people names like “he who drinks much beer.”

Alcohol is created through a process called fermentation. Tiny enwzymes made by yeast turn the sugar in grapes or grains into alcohol.

Believe it or not, alcohol can also be made inside the human body. In Japan, doctors discovered something called "auto-brewery syndrome"—a condition where people got drunk without drinking anything, just because their bodies were producing alcohol on their own.

Alcohol works quickly because your body doesn’t need to digest it. The alcohol molecules are so small that they pass straight from your stomach and intestines into your bloodstream.

A person with more muscle and less fat is usually less affected by alcohol. That’s because muscle holds more water, which helps soak up the alcohol before it reaches the brain.

In the past, people didn’t understand how harmful alcohol could be. Doctors even prescribed it. Until 1916, brandy and whiskey were considered medicine in the U.S. In the late 1800s, doctors sometimes gave beer to pregnant women or recommended it for children as a nutritional boost.

The ingredients that make up alcohol, hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen are found all over space. In fact, scientists found a huge cloud of alcohol floating 10,000 light-years away from Earth. It’s said to contain enough alcohol to make 400 trillion beers!

The Malaysian tree shrew, a small animal with a long tail, drinks fermented nectar every night, equal to about nine glasses of wine and doesn’t even get tipsy. Nature’s little champion.

We all know that alcohol can be harmful and is linked to many serious health issues and accidents. But here’s something you might not know: about 24 people die each year from...champagne corks. The pressure inside a champagne bottle is three times that of a car tire, and the cork can fly out so fast it causes injuries, sometimes even fatal ones.