Texas Man’s Stomach Turns Food into Beer After Antibiotic Use

(NaturalSociety.com) If you enjoy starchy snacks, at least you don’t have to worry about those foods being turned to beer in your gut, causing you to measure 5 times over the legal drinking limit despite not having had a single alcoholic drink. This is what one Texas man has to deal with, who actually turns certain foods into beer when he eats them.

If you can imagine eating a plate of pasta or some fresh homemade bread, and then having it instantaneously turn to beer in your gut with all its corresponding effects including slurred speech and incapacitated motor skills – the whole but which corresponds to usual drunkenness – then you know what it is like to be a 61-year old man from Texas who has auto-brewery syndrome.

We’ve all heard of a micro-brewery, but this man’s belly just might make the Guinness Book of World Records for the smallest brewery around. This fellow recently stumbled, drunk, with a 0.37 percent blood alcohol level, into a hospital emergency room seeking help. The alcohol level this man often has, without any alcohol consumption, is five times the legal limit to be able to operate a motor vehicle in Texas. The only problem was that he swore he hadn’t had a sip of alcohol all day.

A nurse, who is the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas, says the man would get drunk at random times during the week and not know why, since he never drank alcohol. Some medical experts chalked up the problem to closet drinking and thought he was an alcoholic, and his wife even bought him a Breathalyzer because she was so worried about him.

It was, a gastroenterologist named Dr. Justin McCarthy in Lubbock who decided to investigate this man’s problem further. After isolating him in a hospital room for 24 hours without alcohol, but with full access to carbohydrate-rich foods, his blood alcohol level reached 0.12 percent. This was the piece of information that lead to an understanding of his problem. Eventually, McCarthy along with another doctor, Cordell, found that he was suffering from Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a rare disease which causes all yeast that is consumed to start to ‘brew’ and ferment right in a person’s stomach.

The findings were recently published in a medical journal by the doctors to help others who might find themselves inebriated without trying to be.