# Can ALCOHOL decrease/treat SIBO?



## Psilocybin (Nov 4, 2012)

It's pretty commonsense knowledge that alcohol kills bacteria. Pretty much all bacteria, hence why it's sometimes used to disinfect cuts. It's also well known that alcohol in moderation, red wine in particular, is beneficial for HDL and cardiovascular health.

Food travels from 1 Mouth -> 2 Esophagus -> 3 _Stomach -> |3.5 Pyloric Sphincter | -> 4 Small Intestine_ -> 5 Large Intestine -> 6 Rectum -> 7 Toilet -> 8 Sink, hopefully

I NEVER drink. I make an earnest effort to abstain from alcohol for the sake of my slow liver. However, since it was Halloween and my birthday, I decided to celebrate with a fancy bottle of dry red wine. That morning I took a liver supplement (Milk thistle + L-Cysteine) to mitigate some of the liver damage. I didn't have much, a small glass worth. However, I noticed that my SIBO (undiagnosed, but I'm about 99.9% sure I have it. I have all the classic symptoms including rosacea) symptoms were not bothering me after I drank. Generally after eating, I'll get the burps (I don't know anyone who can burp louder than me) or some very mild hiccups. I was eating a bunch of hard to digest crappy carb-laden food (birthday cake, brownies and dried banana chips) maybe an hour before drinking.

As far as I know, alcohol is only absorbed once its in the small intestine. This is why you don't get drunk IMMEDIATELY after you drink alcohol, whereas smoking marijuana is pretty much immediate because it enters your bloodstream as soon as it enters your lungs. If alcohol works much like an antibiotic in the sense that it kills bacteria without discrimination, couldn't it explain some of the research-backed health benefits? The consensus among doctors and people-who-drink-alcohol-but-aren't-alcoholics is pretty much that a glass of red wine a day has more benefit than it does negatives.

Digestifs (alcoholic beverages drank with a meal) are commonly drank as a digestive aid post-meal. One other "benefit" of alcohol is its ability to break down proteins, kind of like Betaine HCl and Pepsin do. 
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-digestif.htm

If alcohol remains unchanged until it reaches the SI, it's logical to assume that it kills off whatever bacteria is in there. Unless I'm missing something here? Do you think this theory makes sense? Could alcohol be used to relieve or possibly even treat SIBO symptoms instead of antibiotics? Could 100% abstinence from alcohol actually be a BAD thing for some people? One benefit of using red wine instead of antibiotic is that I'm pretty sure the bacteria don't build up a tolerance/resistance to alcohol, unlike antibiotic resistance. C

Where does Candida Albicans fit into this picture? Does Candida reside in the Small Intestine or the Large Intestine or both? One of the byproducts of yeast metabolism is commonly alcohol (that's how we make beer and wine.) Does this mean fungi/yeasts like Candida are not killed off by alcohol?

Here's my line of thinking: Alcohol + Stomach -> Small Intestine + SIBO + Alcohol -> Small Intestine - SIBO - Alcohol -> Aldehyde (byproduct of alcohol metabolism.)


----------



## Kathleen M. (Nov 16, 1999)

Usually for alcohol to kill off substantial amounts of bacteria you are talking more like 140 proof, not the amount in one glass of wine.

So it is hard for me to believe one glass killed of what normally take a week or more of strong antibiotics.

Now alcohol is biologically active and has effects on the gut, so maybe it agreed with you. It can also effect a lot of other systems so hard to know why it may have worked this time (or if it even had anything to do with why you felt better).

I think once the alcohol concentration gets high enough it kills off the Brewers yeast which is an entirely different critter than C. albicans. Not even at all the same genera of yeast. I think that is why wine and beer can only get so strong.

So far as I know SIBO is a bacterial thing not so much a yeast thing, and the amount of yeast that can grown in there seems fairly low unless you have HIV or other severe illness. Most of the every disease is yeast promoters do not use scientific testing to prove you have yeast.


----------



## Psilocybin (Nov 4, 2012)

Kathleen M. said:


> Usually for alcohol to kill off substantial amounts of bacteria you are talking more like 140 proof, not the amount in one glass of wine.
> 
> So it is hard for me to believe one glass killed of what normally take a week or more of strong antibiotics.
> 
> ...


Eh, I'm not so sure that cuts the mustard. There's no difference between 12% alcohol and 40% alcohol with the exception of concentration. Alcohol is alcohol. It's like taking 50mg of an antibiotic as opposed to taking 100mg of an antibiotic. 50mg will still kill bacteria, just not as many as 100mg. 12% will still kill bacteria, just less than a 40% alcohol-containing beverage. The question then is _how sensitive are these bacteria to alcohol_? I'm fairly certain the answer is "sensitive enough." When I used to break out as a teenager, I had these alcohol-based skin cleansing wipes and they seemed to drastically reduce my breakouts. But acne is tricky because it's a combination of skin bacteria and inflammation. I doubt the alcohol was doing anything for my inflammation, but it definitely killed the bacteria on my skin. Just an n=1 example. How sensitive do you think these "good" bacteria that happen to overgrow in the SI are to alcohol, Kathleen M. ?

Of course a glass of wine wouldn't kill off as much bacteria as an antibiotic (since antibiotics are specifically geared towards killing bacteria, whereas it just happens to be a trait of alcohol.) But I'd be hard pressed to believe that the alcohol isn't killing whatever is in the SI to some degree. I don't see why it wouldn't.

And yes, you're right that the strains of yeast are different, but the metabolic byproducts are the same in this case.


----------



## Kathleen M. (Nov 16, 1999)

When I used to use alcohol to sterilize spreaders we needed 70% (140 proof) or higher to do a good job of killing off the bacteria, and then we'd burn the alcohol off so it wouldn't kill the bacteria on the plate. And the skin sterilizers are usually also much higher percentage than wine, but to each their own.

You can't convince a toxicologist that the dose doesn't make the poison after all.







It's kinda the law we live by.









And there are some bacteria (or their spores) that survive soaking in 90% (180 proof) and the flame. Of course they even survived a trip through the autoclave, tough buggers.







Even worse they were motile and grew faster than what we wanted to be growing.









However, if you need to believe that the alcohol in a glass wine greatly diluted by the water dumped into the small intestine (which will not kill off the bacteria that turn it to vinegar) could only do it by wiping out billions of bacteria in the small intestine and wipe out almost the entire population in there in one fell swoop and seem to be way more effective than the antibiotics in symptom reduction, feel free. I won't try to argue you out of it. I'm just not sure how killing a small percentage would be doing more than what takes days of a specific antibiotic to kill works.

There are some other biological mechanisms that I think could be playing a role, but whatever floats your boat.









I'm certain you felt better, just not certain your proposed mechanism is the one and only possible or logical or reasonable explanation.

And that was what I was trying to say, it could possible be working from all of the other biological actions alcohol has which have zero to do with killing bacteria. I believe it helped you, but if the one and only reason has to be bacteria killing, then you go with that.







Feel free.

I still think if it really helps in doses that are healthy, the DO IT!







Or is that wrong too?

I'm unclear how metabolically identical the various strains of yeast are, after all a strain that is much more closely related to brewers yeast is used as a probiotic, so I don't think they are all 100% identical. After all why something is a probiotic is because it has a different metabolism.


----------

