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Beer-Producing Gut Gets Man Drunk on Bread

Discover the intriguing case of auto-brewery syndrome, where a man brewed beer in his gut without drinking. Find out how!

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Here's a medical mystery for you. A man checks himself into an emergency room in Texas because he feels dizzy. Dizzy? Try drunk. His blood alcohol concentration is soaring at 0.37 percent. But here's the sticking point: the man hasn't had a single drink that day. How the heck? Theory one: the man was a closet alcoholic. Plausible, but not the case. Theory two: there was something more going on. To find out, doctors isolated the man in a hospital room for 24 hours. Without any alcohol, the medical team still saw his BAC spike after eating. Turns out the man had a thriving colony of brewer's yeast in his gut. As reported by NPR

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"The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch — a bagel, pasta or even a soda — the yeast fermented the sugars ...

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