This GI Doctor Is Warning People About A Viral Hack For Preventing Food-Borne Illness
Have you ever taken a bite of something, or maybe even finished your plate, and things just felt...off? Same.
From there, your options usually feel pretty limited, and pretty bleak. You can try taking a preemptive nausea or stomach medication, drink something fizzy, or (my method of choice) lay in despair about your imminent tummy ache.
Ginger ale and a Brat diet for me, please. (Are you bumpin' that?!)
Amalia Rubin has certainly been in this predicament. She’s a 37-year-old PhD student based in Nepal studying Himalayan societies, languages, and cultures. She's also a digital creator, having amassed over 135K followers on TikTok and over 22K on Instagram.
In July, Amalia posted a video on both platforms, and it took off. It's now gained over 1.5 million views on TikTok, and some of the many comments on the Instagram version have amassed tens of thousands of likes. In the video, she discusses a potential method for stopping food-borne illness before it starts using — yes — hard liquor.
Amalia starts the video by warning that the following advice is for grown-ups, which is a very important note.
She then explains that 1. Alcohol is a sterilizer and 2. She just ate some food she thinks might not have been good... You might see where this is going.
Amalia Rubin / Via instagram.com
She then cites a peer-reviewed study that showed that consuming a shot glass worth of liquor of at least 10% ABV (aka 20 proof) alongside or immediately after food "can reduce your likelihood of foodborne illness [...] by around 45%."
Amalia Rubin / Via instagram.com
And then, of course, bottoms up!
Amalia Rubin / Via instagram.com
Amalia told BuzzFeed how she came to know, and later research, the practice: "Many years ago, while visiting rural Kyrgyzstan, I got a bit sick to my stomach, and to my surprise, my friend took me to a pharmacy where they poured me a little cup of vodka," she said. "One thing I've learned from world travel is not to just immediately dismiss it, so I wondered if there was any scientific research to the idea of alcohol creating a hostile environment for bacteria. I was also curious because of how many cultures have after-dinner drinks as alleged digestive aids."
So...is this real? According to Amalia, she's had success with chasing risky food with a shot of hard liquor — which is why she shared the trick on social media in the first place. "I have found that it works, but I recognize that I am literally a sample size of one and it means nothing," Amalia said. "Maybe the food I was eating wasn't in fact carrying any bacteria. Maybe I'm just lucky. I'm not a heavy drinker, so perhaps it's just that the single shot of vodka or rum calms me down a little from the potential fear of getting sick, and it's purely placebo in my case."
"But the data is there in peer-reviewed studies, and since it is not heavy drinking, I feel like it's not a bad method," she said.
I wanted some answers, so I asked a gastroenterologist and the answer is: Kind of. Maybe.
Meet Dr. Rashmi Advani, a triple board-certified medical doctor specializing in interventional and endobariatric gastroenterology based in Long Island, New York.
She has some thoughts about the claim that ingesting alcohol might be able to prevent food-borne illness: If you were hoping to use this as a fail-safe, she's got some bad news, and it starts with the 2002 study that Amalia cited in her video.
"Since then, there has been complete silence about the topic because there is a lot of question in the medical community about the validity of the actual study that this was based upon," Dr. Advani said.
The 2002 study examined an outbreak of illness caused by Salmonella ohio in people who had attended a 120-person banquet in Castellón, Spain.
Dr. Advani said the study had been based on what's called a sub-analysis. "In the medical community [...], a sub-analysis is a sub-optimal analysis because that was not the intended protocol for the study, so it wasn't powered accordingly."
"When you look at the actual data, the number of people that they're quoting this off of is very, very small, which is not enough for us to make a definitive conclusion about it," she said.
So there might be evidence that supports the claim, but the data is weak. However, Dr. Advani did explain the potential scientific mechanism behind the practice.
"Potentially alcohol, because it can be more acidic, can kill off bacteria, actually all and every bacteria, even the good ones," she said. Because of the acid level present in alcohol, there's a potential effect of killing off food-borne illness-causing bacteria in the digestive tract, but also of killing off all kinds of beneficial bacteria that live in your gut.
She mentioned another study that examined the survival of food-borne pathogens like Salmonella, E. coli (remember the romaine lettuce scare of 2018?), and listeria — three of the main bacteria that cause food-borne illnesses — in craft beer with low or zero alcohol.
"Those three bacteria tend to grow in less cold [warmer] drinks and in drinks that were more alkaline compared to more acidic," Dr. Advani said. "So we think that could be the potential mechanism behind it, because of maybe this one study showing that, that bacteria tend to not grow in more acidic environments, in cooler temperatures."
Again, there's pretty minimal hard data to support this, but that doesn't completely rule it out. Some commenters on Amalia's video also wondered about the use of another substance for the same effect, like vinegar for its acidity or activated charcoal for its ability to adsorb (molecularly absorb) toxins. So I asked Dr. Advani:
"You could potentially make the argument to try something like that, although obviously anything that you put into your system has not just that [desired] effect, but can have effects globally or systematically in the body. So you kind of have to weigh out the risks and benefits," she said. She also mentioned that ingesting vinegar can increase your risk of reflux and gut inflammation, which can cause several negative "downstream effects," including on gut-brain communication.
She added that activated charcoal also doesn't have great data behind it but that a prescription stomach ulcer medication called sucralfate (Carafate) can be used to improve the stomach lining and reduce inflammation.
And if you do choose to use alcohol to prevent food-borne illness, it gets worse: "If we look at the effects of alcohol on the entire body, no matter what percentage you're taking in, you have a lower immunity just by killing off those good bacteria in your gut. Once [the good bacteria] die, the substances they secrete to protect the gut also are not created. So the gut is more susceptible to inflammation from anything."
Dr. Advani compared the brain and the gut to "a close married couple; they talk all the time." So, she says, if you negatively impact the gut, the same is true for the brain, potentially leading to "depression and anxiety, low stress tolerance, increased stress, poor sleep." Basically, everything.
In conclusion: "These are things that can impact your body on a global scale. It can also make you more susceptible to infections down the line. So if you're killing off the good bacteria that would protect you, actually, from these food-borne illnesses, [...] it's almost counterintuitive, but you have an increased risk of having gut infections, and then also IBS."
Essentially — and Amalia agrees — it's better to try to prevent illness in the first place. But that isn't always possible, especially when traveling, and she appreciates having a risk mitigation method.
She emphasized that it's not an ideal or foolproof method and that she is not encouraging heavy drinking.
"I think it's a risk you take if you're [traveling]. I would try to find a place where you know how they prepare the food; you've eaten there before, so you haven't had issues before," Dr. Advani said. "Whether you're in Nepal, or whether you're going to an Arby's, you can't be 100% sure what you're ingesting."
When asked about how to best mitigate the risk of food-borne illness after consumption, Dr. Advani said there's not really a medically recommended method, and that you'll just have to ride it out and "be nice to your GI tract."
"Once you've ingested the food, there's really nothing that you can take [for] a protective effect," she said. "Once you have the infection, then it is definitely not recommended to drink alcohol or things that could be potentially damaging to your GI tract."
So if you are sick with a food-borne illness, stick to the bland stuff, and hold off on the meat and dairy.
Whether or not you're sick (or worried you might become sick), Dr. Advani emphasized the benefits of maintaining a healthy gut microbiome with things like prebiotics and probiotics, along with a high-fiber diet.
She also expressed a growing concern among the medical and GI community about the increase in alcohol consumption following the COVID pandemic.
"We are seeing a lot more GI diseases, including a resurgence of cirrhosis, which is liver scarring from alcohol, and then basically liver malfunction," she said. "We're really worried about it."
So, food safety is the gold standard for preventing food-borne illnesses in the first place. Aside from that, it's up to you to make informed decisions that you feel are right for you and your body.
For at-home food safety tips from a chef, check out our ultimate food safety quiz and learn a thing or two.
