Why do men and women differ in their sensitivity to alcohol?
Alcohol produces intoxication by affecting neurons in your brain. However, it is almost always consumed orally. Thus, alcohol has to be emptied by your stomach into your small intestine, whereupon it is absorbed into your blood and carried throughout your body. If you think of your body as a series of connected containers, it is easy to see how body size can effect level of intoxication. If your brain is one container, and the rest of your body is another container, having a larger body will result in your having less alcohol available to your brain. This is one of the major reasons why women (who are on average smaller than men) get drunker then men after consuming similar amounts of alcohol; more of the alcohol is available to their brain. A second factor is muscle mass; since muscle is highly perfused by blood, having more muscle results in more alcohol staying in your ‘body container’, resulting in less available for the brain. Since women typically have higher percentage of body f
