Binge drinking is pretty bad. It's bad for you and may put you in dangerous situations. There are a LOT of negative health effects associated with binge drinking and alcoholism in general.
You knew that, so I bet no one has ever told you that binge drinking may save your life one day.
Here's some sciencey background:
You non-scientists who may be confused, stay with me here. Scientists who may be bored, you stay with me too. It gets interesting.
To most, "Alcohol" means ethanol; CH3CH2OH; that's what you drink. Actually there are a lot of kinds of alcohol. To the organic chemist, "alcohol" means just about any jumble of atoms that happens to have an -OH on one end. (NO! Water (HOH) is not an alcohol. Very funny.)
The image below shows some different kinds of alcohols. You may recognize isopropanol as rubbing alcohol.
Why does ethanol make you drunk? We actually don't know that. There are a lot of really good ideas. Some of them have something to do with how your body breaks down ethanol.
How does your body break down ethanol? An enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase. The enzyme looks like the bundle of protein spaghetti below.
Notice that it's called Alcohol dehydrogenase, not ethanol dehydrogenase. When I showed you all those kinds of alcohols before, did you wonder why we don't drink any of them other than ethanol? It turns out this enzyme acts on some of those alcohols too.
Alcohol dehydrogenase turns ethanol into acetaldehyde, which is a harmless little chemical present in coffee, bread, and fruit.
The SAME ENZYME acts on methanol to form formaldehyde as shown below. Formaldehyde is also naturally occurring, but in very small concentrations. As you probably know, it is highly toxic to humans.
Methanol is pretty common in our lives. It is used in windshield washer fluid, antifreeze and even sometimes used as a fuel. Have you ever heard that methanol will make you go blind? That's not true. All by itself, methanol is pretty harmless. Unfortunately, your body, through alcohol dehydrogenase, turns methanol into formaldehyde, which is what makes you go blind, and, in high enough doses, die.
Where am I going with this. Why have I educated you so about alcohol metabolism?
There are times when people, especially young children, or even animals accidentally consume methanol. Ever smelled antifreeze? Yeah, it smells like Gatorade, which is a pretty attractive smell to those who don't know better.
The cool thing is that you can save someone from methanol poisoning by getting them really, really drunk.
That enzyme I was telling you about? Well you only have so much of it in your body, and it can only work so fast. So if you accidentally drink some methanol, and then flood your system with a whole lot of ethanol, the enzyme will mostly convert ethanol to acetaldehyde. It will still run the dangerous formaldehyde reaction to some degree, but stalling it with the ethanol will provide enough time for most of the methanol to pass through your system without being converted to formaldehyde.
