A Rum Ball Rumble

 

We made rum balls on the weekend.

 

Well, I didn’t as much as the grandkids did and I provided technical advice here and there, but it reminded me of a former work colleague who warned me of her sister’s rum balls: “Be careful, if you have one of them you will not be able to drive afterwards!”. 

 

The first time she told me I took it to be a bit of Christmas myth, but it was a yearly warning and, prompted by our current activities, I decided to look into it more closely.

 

So, how much rum is need to take you to 0.05% blood alcohol?

 

According to the the Australian Government’s Health Department , a standard drink of spirits is 30mL.

 

From my days of doing blood alcohol testing, the general guidelines for someone with a normally frisky liver was that one standard drink raised your blood alcohol by 0.01% and your liver reduced it by 0.01% an hour.  This will vary all over the paddock with weight, age and gender but will do for this discussion.

 

So, not allowing for time, you need about 150mL of rum to get to 0.05% blood alcohol.

 

So how much is in a rum ball?

 

The Australian Women’sd Weekly Classic Rum Ball Recipe uses 60mL of rum for 40 rum balls, or 1.5mL per ball.  A long way short of the 150mL needed.

 

Of course, not all rum balls are the same size.

 

If the rumball was 17cm in diameter, yes it would have enough rum to take you to 0.05% blood alcohol.

 

But it would weigh over two kilograms and have over 32,000kJ (7700 Cal). 

 

Driving would be the last thing on your mind.

 

I'll drink to that!

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You are not going to want to read this: chocolate cannot be relied upon as a source of antioxidants to boost cardiovascular health. But it gets worse: drinking coffee and red wine in the hope it will prevent heart disease doesn't work either.

- The Age Newspaper.

Why am I not surprised?

Have I not said from day one (of this blog) that there are no silver bullets?

Note: I do have to be careful - the reports in the media are exactly what I expected to be the case so the temptation to be uncritical is high.

But really why should anything be a silver bullet? We, as animals, have evolved along with the plants. Some we have leant to eat safely. Some we have learnt will kill us and should be avoided. True, there may be some plants which have beneficial properties but it is pure fluke and certainly there is no reason to think that, if a little is beneficial, a lot will be more so.

Even red wine.
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A rum deal.

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People are funny critters.

I was telling someone last night that I was going to sprinkle some brandy on my Xmas cake and they responded with "With my cake, two slices and you can't stand up".

Really?

Another friend swears that, after two of her sister's rum balls, you will not be able to drive.

Have they thought this through?

You need about 5 standard drinks to reach the legal limit to drive. I have done a few searches of rum ball recipes and the typical level of rum is about 5%. More or less.

Now a standard drink is 30ml for spirits, so to get five drinks worth of rum under your belt you need to eat 3kg (6.6lb) of rum balls in a hour.

And to loosen your belt.

I'm thinking not.

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Alcohol & Mouth Cancers.

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A local news outlet ran with a story recently that said research had shown that increased alcohol consumption lead to increased mouth cancers.

The trail to try to find the supporting research lead back to a UK cancer body but a request for a reference went unanswered.

The report (SBS News) said that over the last 30 years alcohol consumption had gone up and so had the incidence of mouth cancers. Ergo, drinking increases your chances of mouth cancer. The stated increase was 25%.

Sounds scary. But what if the chance had gone from 1 in a million to 1.25 in a million.

Not quite so scary.

And what else has changed over the last 30 years with things that go into people's mouths?

The Western diet has dramatically increased its consumption of chilli, a known mouth irritant.
Much more processed food.
Much more junk food.
Many more novel food additives, such as artificial sweeteners.
Vegetable consumption has decreased.
Fruit consumption has decreased.
Oral sex has, anecdotally, increased. (human papilloma virus (HPV), is a known carcinogen.)
Beer consumption down, wine consumption up.
Genetically modified foods introduced.

To mention just a few.

I will take their survey just a little more seriously when they can tell me how they allowed for these other changes.

And who paid for the research. And why.
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It's not the apples inside him, it's the alcohol in cider.

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WARSAW - A Polish lawmaker who failed a drink-driving test said
he had eaten too many apples, the website of daily Gazeta Wyborcza said Monday.

Asked why a traffic police check Sunday showed he had 0.7 units of alcohol in his blood, Marek Latas denied having drunk alcohol that day.

"I am diabetic, I ate a few apples before driving.

"I have been involved in no accident, I underwent a routine roadside check. I was confident there was no chance I had alcohol in my blood," said Latas, a member of parliament for the conservative opposition Law and Justice Party. The prosecutor's office is investigating his case, the website said. In Poland, the legal limit for alcohol when driving is 0.2 units.

- Reuters

Cute story. Could it be true?

Assuming their alcohol limit is 0.05% (I don't understand 'units', that usually refers to drinks consumed.), the guy had a level of three and a half times that: 0.175%.

As a rule of thumb you blood alcohol level goes up by 0.01% per standard drink and down by 0.01% per hour. That blood level is equivalent to about 20 drinks over, say, three hours.

That's about 5 litres of 'liquor', requiring the juice of about three dozen apples.

Not only do you need to eat 36 apples, you need to retain them in your stomach for 3-6 days.

Not only do you need to retain them in your stomach for 3-6 days you need a yeast that will live in there. A stomach is about 100 times more acidic than the normal cider fermentation process. You need a super yeast and you need to be able to deal with a lot of released gas from the fermentation process. (burp).

And all that assumes that his liver is not metabolising the alcohol as it is produced.

Guilty as charged, I fear.

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Wine & Champagne

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Kris loves Chocolate wrote "When I drink (one glass, I am not talking getting tipsy here) wine, I get a horrible migraine. Once in awhile I can sip on white wine and be ok, but never red wine. I can drink Champagne though. Someone said I am allergic to the sulphates? No sulphates in Champagne?"

Most alcoholic drinks contain sulphites; it is added to stop fermentation, to kill off unwanted yeasts and generally as a sterilizer in the brewing process.

If the sulphites were the source of your migraines you would get it from wines other than red ones. And foods other than wine. Sulphites are probably the most ubiquitous preservative in our foods, often in levels far higher than found in wine. It is found in anything from dried fruit to manufactured meat. Some people do respond badly to sulphites but it is rare.

Possibly your response is to the histamines in red wine. These are absent (or low) in white wines. Taking an antihistamine tablet before consuming some red wine would tell you whether you are responding to histamines or not. Again, it is possible but rare.

Tannins are another possibility as red wine has more of them than white wine. The colour of red wine is extracted from the grape skins and tannin is also extracted in the process. If this was the case you would expect eating dark grapes would produce a headache. Even drinking tea may give a headache, though obviously different tannins are present in tea.

The short answer is that no one knows why some people get a headache from red wine.

Sorry.
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