When someone intakes alcohol, he/she feels its aftereffects for hours. It clearly means that the alcohol doesn’t vanish right after you stop drinking. Rather, it stays in your system for a sufficient period, depending on many factors.
However, how long can it stay in your body after you take the last drink? Well, the answer to this question cannot be a specific hour, minutes, or seconds. This is because the time it takes to metabolize and eliminate the alcohol from the system varies from person to person. Apart from that, many other things also influence this timing.
In this article, we will discuss the journey of alcohol in your body and the factors on which the stay of alcohol depends on your body. Also, we will tell you how you can estimate the alcohol level of your body. So, let’s start on an informative journey.
Journey Of Alcohol In Your Body
As you take the first sip of alcohol, it quickly finds its way to your bloodstream. After that, it passes through a step-by-step process to leave your body. Here is what exactly happens when you intake alcohol, whether less or more:
Absorption
It is a straightforward concept that when you intake alcohol, it directly goes to your stomach. However, after reaching the stomach, it doesn’t stay there; rather, it starts penetrating your blood. Just as your blood absorbs other nutrients from your stomach, it also consumes alcohol molecules from there.
Distribution
After passing through the absorption process, alcohol starts navigating through your bloodstream and reaches different organs. This phase of transporting the alcohol molecules to different tissues, muscles, and organs is called distribution. When it reaches your brain, liver, and other parts, you start feeling its effects.
Elimination
Once the alcohol gets distributed to different parts of your system, the process of its elimination starts. When the breakdown of molecules of alcohol initiates, your symptoms start normalizing gradually. The main organ that takes part in eliminating alcohol from your body is the liver, which removes 90–95% of alcohol. The remaining 5% is eliminated through breath, sweat, and urine.
Factors Affecting The Duration of Alcohol In Your Body
As mentioned earlier, when we talk about the stay of alcohol in the system, there is no pre-defined timeframe. The duration of the existence of alcohol in your body depends on many factors that are mentioned below.
Metabolism
The main thing on which the duration of alcohol in your body depends is the efficiency of your metabolism. If you are a healthy person with a fast metabolism, it is more likely that the breakdown of alcohol molecules will occur quickly. But if you have bad medical conditions, your metabolism will take time to eliminate alcohol, keeping it in your body longer.
Food Intake
The presence of food in your stomach before consuming alcohol greatly affects its absorption. While getting digested, the food slows down the penetration of alcohol into the blood, leading to a longer stay of alcohol in your system. Conversely, drinks taken on an empty stomach are absorbed earlier and hence leave the body sooner.
Body Weight
Your body size matters a lot in determining when the alcohol will leave your system. If your weight is higher than normal, then you will have a lower blood alcohol concentration. On the other hand, if you are underweight, the BAC level will be higher in your system.
Gender And Age
Alcohol stays longer in women as compared to men due to significant differences in body composition and enzyme levels. So, if you are a woman and intake the same drink that a man takes, your body will be expected to retain the alcohol for more time. On the other hand, your age may greatly influence the retention of alcohol. The bodies of older people are at higher risk of keeping alcohol in their blood than the elders.
Alcohol Tolerance
The alcohol tolerance of your body is another factor that decides whether the alcohol will remain longer in your system or not. The metabolism system of frequent drinkers digests the alcohol more quickly than that of those who drink occasionally. However, being a regular user of alcohol doesn’t mean you consume too much of it.
How Alcohol Level Is Measured In Your Body?
The level of alcohol, which is also called BAC (body alcohol concentration), indicates how long the alcohol will stay in your system. Usually, your breath, urine, or blood are tested to determine the BAC level. However, it can also be measured using an online BAC calculator that provides an estimated BAC percentage.
You just have to input some essential data into an alcohol calculator, such as your age, gender, drink name, drink time, weight, and number of drinks. After taking these details from you, the blood alcohol calculator processes the values and shows the BAC. Apart from that, it also tells you the estimated time that alcohol may take to leave your body.
The Final Words
To put it simply, the stay of alcohol in your system depends on your age, gender, size, metabolism, and intake of food before drinking. Additionally, the ability of your body to tolerate alcohol may also affect its stay in your system. After going through this article, we hope that you now have a clear idea of alcohol retention in the human system.