July 7, 1955: You can't get drunk on beer

August 14, 2015 at 2:34AM
Ben Welter ORG XMIT: MIN2012083116403976
Ben Welter (The Minnesota Star Tribune)

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A 1955 United Press story in the Minneapolis Tribune shows you can have the right facts and still be wrong:

NEW YORK – Yale university's famed studies on alcoholism have produced a controversy over whether or not beer is an intoxicating beverage. Dr. Leon A. Greenberg, Yale professor of physiology, said beer isn't.

His theory: For people to show the "abnormal behavior" which goes with intoxication, the alcohol content of their blood must be 0.15 percent or higher. The average alcohol content of American beers is 3.7 percent. For the alcohol blood level to be at 0.15 percent, there would have to be 2 ½ quarts of 3.7 beer in the stomach. But the capacity of the stomach is 1 ½-2 quarts. Therefore, no one can drink enough beer at one time to get intoxicated.

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