Somehow I came across this thing called PePP, marketed as a hangover cure. The web site (pepp-up.com) claims to "reduce alcohol levels by 50% within 40 minutes", which seems like a dubious claim to me.
Short of either vomiting or pissing it out, how can this thing possibly remove alcohol from your system?
Andrew
Pepp is supposed to contain "natural digestive and metabolic enzymes", which digest that nasty alcohol right out from under you!
(They also say it has "...various organic acids, vitamins and nutrients", but adding those things to the enzymes won't do anything to the enzymes except perhaps give them molecules to break down other than the alcohol. Popping multivitamins during a night on the town is not, by itself, exactly a hangover-zapping breakthrough.)
The major problem here - which applies to all of the other "enzyme" supplements as well - is that if you're a reasonably healthy human, your body already produces as many digestive enzymes as it needs. Enzymes you eat will be destroyed in the digestion process, anyway.
So anything these pills do, they'll have to do to alcohol that's still in your stomach or gut. This, in itself, is not ludicrous; enzymatic digestion certainly does happen in the stomach.
I suppose it's possible that the "recent clinical trials" they mention (PDF) actually exist. But, following the ancient tradition of makers of nonsense "supplements", they don't tell you where (or even if) these "studies" have been published. So who knows whether they're just making it all up or not.
There is absolutely no valid reason for anybody citing a scientific study that supports their statements to not mention, at the very least, who did that study and in what journal it was published. "Secret" studies of one kind or another abound in the world of alternative medicine and other Weird Science; as a rule of thumb, you can take unidentified "studies" as an anti-recommendation for a claim, like when you find out Doctor Smith actually bought his doctorate for $50 from a dude in Antigua.
(If the Sydney Morning Herald is to be believed, there was only one "study", and it was actually not so much a study as... a segment on Australian tabloid TV show "A Current Affair". In which they sent four people out to get pissed and two of them took the Pepp pills. And then someone with a clue actually looked at what was in the pills and concluded that "nothing here that is an actual drug or an actual compound that is known to have an effect on alcohol metabolism".)
There's an ingredients list on that page too, which rather tellingly does include the names of six enzymes (the "-ase" compounds), but which puts them at the very end of the list. If they're following standard ingredients-list rules - which they seem to be; the soy and rice protein pill-fillers are at the top of the list - that means that there's less of the enzymes in the pills than of any of the numerous, and irrelevant, other ingredients.
You'd better hope the top-listed enzyme, amylase, doesn't do anything, because the different amylases all break down starch into alcohol. Whoops - screwed that bit up (Thanks, Ubertakter!). The top-listed enzyme, amylase, actually breaks starches down into sugars. It's still pointless in an anti-alcohol concoction, though, and including it as the highest-dose enzyme still looks to me like a very strong indication that (a) there's actually only trace amounts, at most, of any enzymes in the pills, and (b) the makers of the pills think their customers are a bunch of idiots.
Then there's lipase, which catalyses the hydrolysis of ester bonds in water–insoluble lipids. It's irrelevant to alcohol metabolism, but at least it doesn't make more damn alcohol.
Then there's protease, which breaks amino acids apart (nope, still no good for metabolising alcohol), and cellulase, which is used for cellulose metabolism in creatures that can metabolise it (i.e. not us, but who cares, since cellulose isn't alcohol either).
Then there's lactase, which breaks down (wait for it) lactose, not alcohol.
And, finally, there's something just called "Dehydrogenase" in italics. Lets be generous and say that the emphasis means that it's actually class 1, hepatic, alcohol dehydrogenase. And yes, at long last, we now do have a compound that actually does do something to ethanol. Hepatic alcohol dehydrogenase turns ethanol into acetaldehyde.
But wait - that's the end of the list of enzymes in the pills!
So, assuming this stuff actually works and actually converts a significant amount of the alcohol in your stomach into acetaldehyde... that's where it'll stop. It won't go on to apply acetaldehyde dehydrogenase to the result and leave you with harmless acetic acid. It will, instead, leave you with a gut-full of acetaldehyde.
Acetaldehyde is the chemical considered chiefly responsible for hangovers.
People with East Asian genealogy who flush bright red when they drink alcohol and then have immediate hangover symptoms do so because they've got unusually effective alcohol dehydrogenase, and unusually ineffective acetaldehyde dehydrogenase.
The drug disulfiram ("Antabuse") does essentially the same thing to people who don't have that genetic defect.
It would appear that these pills are trying to give everybody the fantastically awful feeling of acetaldehyde poisoning.
Wow, thanks!
Except, of course, they won't, because the (presumably alcohol) dehydrogenase is right down the end of the list of ingredients, so there's probably pretty much none of it in the pill. Maybe literally none; if that were the case, these would be far from the first "supplement" pills that turned out to have none of the allegedly active ingredient in them at all.
The alleged PEPP "studies" are supposed to say that the pills do something if you take them while you're drinking, and hey, maybe despite all this they actually do. Frankly, I think they'd be more likely to cause people taking them to turn into pumpkins, but what do I know.
But if you're going to take an alcohol-destroying pill along with the alcohol you're drinking, as the "studies" allegedly examined - why not just order friggin' ginger ale? Or save a bit less money by buying your expensive booze and pouring it into a potplant, rather than drinking it along with some pills you bought on eBay from Thailand (only ten bucks for... at the moment they don't say how many... pills - in "organge" flavour!) that promise to remove its effect?
What people are actually doing with the pills, apparently, is making the very wise decision to buy them for hilarious prices after they've already gotten drunk, then deciding they feel much better and driving home.
It is statistically unlikely that the people selling the Pepp pills will be the ones these drunk drivers run over.
But one can hope.
