Katie Wu

But for people with Asian glow or alcohol flush, they lack the molecular machinery to break down those toxic aldehydes, and so they're kind of sitting there with poison stewing in their tissues.

for a lot longer.

Yeah, and what is just wild about that is it is one of the most common genetic mutations out there.

And scientists have actually nailed it down to a single change in a single gene, aldehyde dehydrogenase 2.

And so everything is kind of in there in the name.

It dehydrogenates aldehydes, which effectively means it is in its functional form breaking down these toxic aldehydes.

But for people with a mutation, they make basically a broken copy of this aldehyde detoxifying machine.

And so the aldehydes build up.

I will say that because all of us carry two copies of every gene in our body, most people are actually heterozygous, which means they carry one normal copy and one broken copy.

That's the case for most people with this condition.

But the effect is dominant, which means even if you have just one broken copy, you're generally going to experience some of those symptoms, and they can get actually pretty bad.

Why are they so toxic?

Right.

So aldehydes, in short, are carcinogens.

They are these pretty toxic compounds that can actually do direct damage to DNA and proteins if they sit around too long in your cells.

They will cause literal mutations in our genetic code, and that's really not great.

Right.

To have absolutely no functional copies of this gene means that

Anytime that you accumulate aldehydes in your body, whether it's because you're drinking or just living as a normal human who is producing aldehydes as a normal part of metabolism, the aldehydes are not really going to go away very quickly, which means more damage to DNA, more damage to proteins.

Your cells are just going to be kind of living in a rougher state of things, more stressed, more damage, more opportunity for things to go awry.