OK, this is the best beer belly any one of us could ever dream of having. A 61-year-old man found himself getting drunk without ever drinking alcohol because he had brewer’s yeast in his gut. Basically, whenever he ate any carbs, the man’s intestinal tract would start turning that into beer and make him drunk. He had a brewery in his belly.
The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch — a bagel, pasta or even a soda — the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy reported the case of “auto-brewery syndrome” a few months ago in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.
Brewer’s yeast in your belly! Awesome. The man with a brewery gut had a “history of home-brewing” beer and had been recorded with a 0.37 BAC level without drinking at all. Usually, brewer’s yeast doesn’t do harm and goes right through us. It is incredibly rare for it to make itself at home in our gut and turn food into alcohol. If we should all be so lucky. [NPR, Image Credit: Roman Sigaev/Shutterstock]