TUESDAY, May 23 (HealthDay News) -- Blending liquor with a diet mixer is becoming more popular, but a study presented at Digestive Disease Week 2006 on Monday in Los Angeles suggests those who use the artificially sweetened mixers have a quicker gastric emptying time and a higher peak blood alcohol content than those using sucrose-containing mixers.
Chris Rayner, M.D., of the Royal Adelaide Hospital in Australia, and his colleagues gave eight men who had fasted two different drinks on two days: an orange-flavored vodka beverage with a sucrose-containing mixer, totaling 478 calories, and the same beverage with a diet mixer, totaling 225 calories. Each drink had 30 grams of ethanol in 600 milliliters.
Half of the diet-mixer drink cleared the stomach in 21 minutes compared with 36 minutes for the sucrose-containing beverage. For both drinks, peak blood alcohol content was at 30 minutes after ingestion, but the peak average was 0.05 percent for men drinking diet mixers, versus 0.03 percent for those who consumed regular mixers. In most states 0.08 percent is the legal blood-alcohol limit for drivers aged 21 and older.
"Drinking diet versus regular [mixers] could put you in trouble in the eyes of the law," Rayner said. The effects of diet mixers in women still needs to be determined, Rayner said, as women achieve higher blood alcohol concentrations than men with equal amounts of alcohol intake.
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