Everyone wants to get the most for their money. When it comes to drinks, that could mean finding a value wine, mixing inferior ingredients into a superior cocktail or making sure you get as drunk as possible off of the fewest drinks. We’re not judging (so long as you know your limits).
Enter drinking through a straw. It’s classy, it can save your teeth, and it’s one way to deal with that stupid cocktail straw no one knows what to do with. Plus, for the ladies it’s a game changer if you want to keep your flawless pout on fleek. But does it get you more drunk?
The inquiring mind of Pennsylvania State University student Matthew Frantz wanted to know. In an article appropriately entitled, “Do you get Drunk Faster with a Straw?” Frantz writes that a straw creates a vacuum, which eliminates oxygen. “The feeling of intoxication is created in part, because of the lack of oxygen entering us,” young Frantz argued, “so when we form a vacuum with a straw, we should naturally get more drunk.” Furthermore, Frantz writes, the boiling point of alcohol decreases in the straw vacuum, causing the drinker to inhale alcohol vapor which “gets the alcohol into the bloodstream much faster than normal ingestion via the stomach.”
Ultimately, though, despite all these well-reasoned inferences, Frantz admits that the difference would be so negligible “it wouldn’t even be noticeable.” It hasn’t worked for him. Indeed, both the National Institute on Alcoholic Abuse and “MythBusters” weighed in on the topic and agreed with Frantz that there is no evidence that straw sipping works. Absorption of alcohol into your bloodstream is what gets you drunk, and a straw (unless it leads directly into your bloodstream) isn’t changing your absorption rate.
It’s a myth that is just too strawesome to be true.
Straws can make people drink faster. It’s easier to suck down a whiskey Coke through a straw without all that pesky ice rushing your mouth like Mel Gibson in “Braveheart.” Drinking faster means you ingest more alcohol at once, and the alcohol will then hit you harder. So in a way, straws can make you drunk faster, but only in the way a sweet drink might, or a shot with no ice.
So ladies, order that cocktail, drink through that straw and enjoy an evening of unblemished lip swag. You wont be sloppier for it.
