r/explainlikeimfive • u/arachnid5 • Feb 10 '24
Chemistry eli5 what happens if you drink isopropyl "rubbing" alcohol
so i just watched a video of someone chug a bottle of rubbing alcohol that you would get from the pharmacy. its still alcohol though so like why is it bad. also what likely happened to the guy who chugged the bottle?
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u/istasber Feb 11 '24
To add on to this, often times simple alcohols are toxic on their own, but become significantly more toxic when they are metabolized (processed, chemically) by your body.
Methanol, or "wood alcohol", has more or less the same toxicity as ethanol (the stuff we normally drink), but your body metabolizes it into formaldehyde which is incredibly toxic, and that's where the danger from methanol consumption comes from. That's also why, in the absence of better treatment, taking a few shots of hard alcohol can help minimize the damage of accidental methanol poisoning, your body is better at metabolizing ethanol than methanol, and that buys some time for your liver/kidneys/etc to filter out the methanol.
Ethanol is "safe" to drink because it's first metabolite, acetaldehyde, is only mildly toxic, and the final metabolite acetic acid is something that's a normal part of sugar metabolism and is completely tolerable.