The same amount of alcohol is likely to have a greater impact in your 60s or 70s than in your 20s. Here's why one margarita can feel like two or three as you age.
As we age, our ability to metabolize alcohol slows, allowing blood alcohol levels to rise more quickly. Associated with other age-related physiological changes.
Many people do not realize that both men and women develop an increased sensitivity and decreased tolerance to alcohol as they age. It is important to pay attention to this issue because research has shown that alcohol use has increased among people aged 65 and over in recent years.
The effects can be huge in the sense that people think, well, I used to be able to drink X – but they can't necessarily pick up where they left off, as there are a lot of physiological changes that happen as we age."
The simple truth: having a martini or margarita in your 60s or 70s can affect you the way two or three of these cocktails did in your 20s or 30s.
What is behind the lower tolerance?
As people age, their bodies change. Over the decades, for example, a person's body composition changes: The percentage of body fat tends to increase with age, even if their body weight remains the same and the amount of water in their body decreases.
A study in a 2023 publication found that in people whose body weight is in the normal range, water makes up 62 percent of that weight between the ages of three and 10; after that, it remains stable among men and drops to 55 percent among women between the ages of 11 and 60. By age 61, body water decreases in both sexes – to 57 percent in men and 50 percent in women.
Decreasing the body's water content is important because "alcohol is a water-soluble substance," says Alison Moore, director of the Stein Institute for Research on Aging. Because people have less water in their bodies as they get older, "if you drink the same amount at 80 as you did at 30, your blood alcohol level will be much higher."
Remember: At any age, women are more susceptible to the effects of alcohol because women have less water in their bodies than men. Women also have less of a stomach enzyme that helps metabolize alcohol. As a result, if a man and a woman weighing 150 kilograms drink the same amount of alcohol, the woman will have a higher blood alcohol level than the man. While this is true at any age, it also means that women will be even more susceptible to the effects of alcohol as they get older.
The brain also becomes more sensitive to the effects of alcohol as people age, Moore says. "This can make people more likely to develop problems with coordination or balance," increasing their risk of falling. It can also affect judgment, reaction time and driving ability.
Taken together, "all these physiological changes add up," Weaver says.
