Is the phrase “beer before liquor, never sicker” accurate, and if so, why?
The body reacts to beer a bit differently than it does liquor. One clue to this is that it is almost impossible to kill yourself drinking just beer, because your body will start to react and you will get sick long before you can poison yourself to death. Liquor, on the other hand, can be fatal if you drink too much too fast, because more alchohol can enter the bloodstream, and begin to attack the organs, before the body’s reaction can trigger nausea and reduce the amount of alchohol in the stomach. When you are just drinking one kind of drink at a moderate rate, you are more likely to sense the threshold correctly before you get there. When drinking beer, you tend to feel great right up until you hit the threshold, and then you quickly start to feel bad. If you drink enough beer, you may still feel fine even though you are nearing that threshold where the body would normally begin to trigger nausea, you might then have a few drinks of liquor and toss yourself too quickly over that thre
