Does Coffee Help You Sober Up

You may have heard you can drink coffee or take a cold shower to sober up from drinking alcohol, but does it really help? Here is the scientific answer and explanation. The answer to this question is a qualified no. Blood alcohol level doesnt diminish, but you might feel more awake from drinking coffee. Your body takes a certain amount of time to metabolize alcohol. Drinking coffee does not reduce recovery time, which is dependent on the quantity of the enzymes alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase. You cannot make these enzymes more abundant or more effective by drinking coffee. However, coffee contains caffeine  which acts as a stimulant, while alcohol is a central nervous system depressant. Although you will be intoxicated until your body metabolizes the alcohol, the caffeine can serve to wake you up. So, youre still drunk, but not as sleepy. Worse, judgment remains impaired, so an intoxicated person may feel recovered enough to perform risky tasks, like operating a motorized vehicle. Caffeine and the Effects of Alcohol Over Time Caffeine isnt going to make a big difference in how awake you feel early on while drinking. For the first hour and a half after drinking alcohol, blood alcohol levels rise and people actually feel more alert than before. Drinkers dont feel sleepy until 2 to 6 hours after drinking. This is when youre most likely to reach for the coffee as a pick-me-up. Caffeine takes about half an hour to hit your system, so the impact on your wakefulness is delayed, not an immediate reaction to drinking a cup of joe. As you would expect, decaf isnt going to have much of an effect, one way or the other, except to help replenish fluid lost from the dehydrating effect of alcohol. Caffeine or any stimulant dehydrates you, but full-strength coffee doesnt really worsen the effect from drinking alcohol. Experiments on Whether Coffee Sobers You Up Even if your metabolism is faster, experiments have shown that even after several cups of coffee, caffeinated drunks dont fare better than their intoxicated, uncaffeinated counterparts. There doesnt seem to be any shortage of volunteers willing to drink alcohol and coffee for science, either. The Mythbusters team performed eye-hand coordination tests, had a couple of rounds, performed tasks, and then tested reactions again after several cups of coffee. Their small study indicated coffee did not help eye-hand coordination. The effects of caffeine on intoxication arent limited to humans.  Danielle Gulick, PhD, now of Dartmouth College, examined how well young adult mice were able to navigate a maze, comparing a group injected with different amounts alcohol and caffeine versus a control group injected with saline. While the drunk and sometimes caffeinated mice moved around more than their sober counterparts and were more relaxed, they did not complete the maze as well. The drunk mice, with or without caffeine, did not exhibit anxious behavior. They explored the maze just fine, but they were not able to figure out how to avoid parts of the maze that had bright lights or loud noises. While the study doesnt say, its possible the mice simply didnt mind those things while intoxicated. In any case, caffeine did not alter mice behavior, compared with how they acted when exposed to alcohol alone. The Danger of Drinking Coffee If Youre Drunk One dangerous effect of drinking coffee while intoxicated is that the person under the influence thinks he is more sober than he was pre-coffee.  Thomas Gould, Ph.D., of Temple University, published a study in the  journal  Behavioral Neuroscience that concluded people associate feeling tired with being intoxicated. If they arent sleepy, they may not recognize they are still intoxicated. Not all research is so clear-cut. Studies have been conducted on the effect of drinking coffee on the driving ability of intoxicated subjects (no, the drunk drivers werent out on public roads). Results to date have been mixed. In some cases, coffee seemed to partially reverse the sedative effect of alcohol, leading to an improvement in reaction time. In other tests, coffee did not improve driving performance. You may also enjoy reading  about why coffee makes (some) people poop. Source Liguori A,  Robinson JH.  Caffeine antagonism of alcohol-induced driving impairment.  Drug Alcohol Depend.  2001 Jul 1;63(2):123-9.