So actually people who have so little alcohol dehydrogenase that when they ingest alcohol, they get very red and they just feel sick. So if you're somebody that has a sip of alcohol and you just feel horrible, it makes you feel nauseous, chances are you have gene variants that create a situation where you're not making very much alcohol dehydrogenase, you just simply can't metabolize alcohol.

So you just get a rapid buildup of the toxic effects of alcohol, the acetyl aldehyde. You're not converting it into those empty calories. In cultures where you have a lot of genetic variants and genes expressed in people where they have a lot of alcohol dehydrogenase, sure, they can drink more and they're converting more of that alcohol from its toxic form to a non-toxic form.

And yes, of course, you will observe more alcoholism in those communities because they're drinking more. But I do wanna emphasize that the environmental factors are playing a strong role there too, because if you can drink more, you're likely to drink more. If you're somebody that feels sick immediately from drinking, it's likely that you're not gonna engage in alcohol consumption, especially if these things are genetically related and of course, genes and culture and location in the world tend to run together.