Her body is a brewery: Woman whose body turns food into alcohol beats drink-drive charge

The woman from New York state suffers from ‘auto-brewery syndrome’ but blew four times over the limit despite claiming that she ‘never felt tipsy’

 

In tests by doctors, the woman blew well over the legal limit even though she had not had any alcohol, her lawyer said. Photograph: Jack Sullivan / Alamy/Alamy


Associated Press in The Guardian


Drunken-driving charges against a woman in upstate New York have been dismissed based on an unusual defence: her body is a brewery.

The woman was arrested while driving with a blood-alcohol level more than four times the legal limit. She then discovered she has a rare condition called “auto-brewery syndrome”, in which her digestive system converts ordinary food into alcohol, her lawyer Joseph Marusak said.

A town judge in the Buffalo suburb of Hamburg dismissed the charges after Marusak presented research by a doctor showing the woman had the previously undiagnosed condition in which high levels of yeast in her intestines fermented high-carbohydrate foods into alcohol.

The rare condition, also known as gut fermentation syndrome, was first documented in the 1970s in Japan, and both medical and legal experts in the US say it is being raised more frequently in drunken-driving cases as it is becomes more known.

“At first glance, it seems like a get-out-of-jail-free card,” said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. “But it’s not that easy. Courts tend to be sceptical of such claims. You have to be able to document the syndrome through recognised testing.”

The condition was first documented in the US by Barbara Cordell of Panola College in Texas, who published a case study in 2013 of a 61-year-old man who had been experiencing episodes of debilitating drunkenness without drinking liquor.

Marusak contacted Cordell for help with his client who insisted she had not had more than three drinks in the six hours before she was pulled over for erratic driving 11 October 2014. The woman was charged with driving while intoxicated when a breath test showed her blood-alcohol content to be 0.33%.

Cordell referred Marusak to Dr Anup Kanodia of Columbus, Ohio, who eventually diagnosed the woman with auto-brewery syndrome and prescribed a low-carbohydrate diet that brought the situation under control. Her case was dismissed on 9 December, leaving her free to drive without restrictions.

During the long wait for an appointment, Marusak arranged to have two nurses and a physician’s assistant monitor his client for a day to document she drank no alcohol, and to take several blood samples for testing.

“At the end of the day, she had a blood-alcohol content of 0.36% without drinking any alcoholic beverages,” Marusak said. He said the woman, who cannot be named for reasons of medical confidentiality, also bought a breath test kit and blew into it every night for 18 days, registering around 0.20% every time.

The legal threshold for drunkenness in New York is 0.08%.

While people in cases described by Cordell sought help because they felt drunk and did not know why, Marusak said that was not true of his client. “She had no idea she had this condition. Never felt tipsy. Nothing,” he said.

Christmas is a face-off between people who are spiritual and people who are consumerist

How do you formulate an anti-consumerist worldview that doesn’t involve becoming a killjoy?

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • theguardian.com, Tuesday 23 December 2014 11.22 GMT

'It isn’t my kids' spiritual wellbeing I’m worried about. It’s the volume of plastic tat I have to throw out every year, to make way for the next tranche of plastic tat.' Photograph: Paul Hackett/Reuters

Christmas is a face-off between people who are spiritual and people who are consumerist. The consumerists never call themselves that, they’re just really keen to let you know that they don’t believe in God. The spiritual ones never call themselves spiritual, they are just very anti-consumerist. It’s the dialectic method of identity building: I hate crackers and piped music, ergo I am deep; I hate superstition and unprovable things, ergo I am fun. It’s like a zero-sum game in which the shops helpfully give the spiritualists something to kick against, and the churches, especially with their midnight shenanigans, give the consumerists something to laugh at.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t leave you much room for manoeuvre if you are both anti-consumerist and an atheist. Pretty much everything you say will deliver you into the hands of the wrong ally. Up until now, I have always just succumbed to one side, in order to avoid getting crushed by the competing plates. Between about 1983 and 2013, assuming myself – on the final throw of the dice – to be more of an atheist than an anti-consumerist, I swallowed the shop-fest whole. I remember standing in Marks & Spencer buying a slipper bag for my uncle, crying with laughter at the scope of the needlessness. Who needs a bag to put their slippers in? It’s like having a special wallet for handkerchieves. Probably, if he’d lived a bit longer, I’d have bought him one of those too. None of this ever struck me as at all obscene; it was all at one remove from obscenity, like a cartoon of someone accidentally chopping off their arm.

But having kids has tipped me over the edge. It isn’t their spiritual wellbeing I’m worried about – they have grandparents for that. It’s the volume of plastic tat I have to throw out every year, to make way for the next tranche of plastic tat. It’s like an anxiety dream, this act: shovelling gigantic, brightly coloured items that have detained nobody for one second longer than the time it takes to render them incomplete or no longer working. They are almost new, and completely pointless. I don’t want to blight another household with them, but I can’t face putting them in the bin, so the whole lot from last year spent six months in a sort of staging post, some inconvenient place while I waited for some other person to throw them out for me. If they’re battery powered it’s 10 times worse, because the added complexity is like an accusation. They are all battery powered.

This is when you’re faced with the question that you should have squared up to 20 years ago: how do you formulate an anti-consumerist worldview that doesn’t involve becoming a killjoy? How do you eschew consumption while still maintaining your spiritual hollowness? The people buying the plastic have annexed the space “fun”, while the people with the baby in the manger have appropriated “thought”. I have no ideological home in this season. But I do love the drinking.

Drinking two cans of Monster Energy drink on consecutive days kills 14 year old?

The company is also being sued the family of Anais Fournier, who had a pre-existing heart condition, but says it does not believe its product was 'in any way responsible for the girl’s death'

Monster Beverage Company is being investigated by the US Food and Drug Administration after a 14-year-old girl died after drinking just two cans of its popular energy drink.

The company is also being sued the family of Anais Fournier, who had a pre-existing heart condition, but says it does not believe its product was “in any way responsible for the girl’s death”.

The lawsuit, and reports of several other similar deaths, is likely to add to questions over Monster’s safety, and to escalate calls from its critics to change the way the beverage, which is the fastest growing energy drink in the US, is marketed.

Ms Fournier died of a heart attack brought on by ‘caffeine toxicity’ after drinking two 24-ounce Monster cans - containing 240 milligrams of caffeine, or seven times the amount of the caffeine in a 12-ounce cola - on consecutive days in December 2011.

An autopsy revealed the teenager, from Hagerstown, Maryland, died of cardiac arrhythmia due to caffeine toxicity that impeded her heart's ability to pump blood. The medical examiner also found that she had an inherited disorder that can weaken blood vessels.

Miss Fournier's parents Wendy Crossland and Richard Fournier claim Monster failed to warn about the risks of drinking its products.

Ms Crossland told the Record Herald: 'I was shocked to learn the FDA can regulate caffeine in a can of soda, but not these huge energy drinks.

“With their bright colors and names like Monster, Rockstar, and Full Throttle, these drinks are targeting teenagers with no oversight or accountability. These drinks are death traps for young, developing girls and boys, like my daughter, Anais.”

With double-digit growth through the third quarter of 2012, Beverage Digest Editor John Sicher said he expects energy drink sales to exceed $10 billion this year. He declined to speculate about future growth.

“I don't think they are going to ban energy drinks,” said Morningstar analyst Thomas Mullarkey. “The question arises whether or not it gives them more firepower for increased regulation.”

Monster Beverage Corp said it does not believe its drinks are 'in any way responsible' for Miss Fournier's death.

'Monster is unaware of any fatality anywhere that has been caused by its drinks,' the company said in a statement. It said it intends to vigorously defend itself in the suit.