Katie Wu

One possible way to sort of think about it is like, if you picture a sink that's draining and what you want to do is get rid of all the poison in the sink by fully draining it and the faucet is running, there is no way to totally shut off your aldehyde faucet because your body is constantly metabolizing something.

People who have two normal copies of aldehyde dehydrogenase have a completely unstopped sync.

The stopper is totally lifted.

And if you are heterozygous, you have just one defunct copy.

It's lowered maybe halfway, but rotter is still dribbling through.

If you have no functional copies, you've basically plugged that sync.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, when you're drinking, it's like you've not only got the faucet dripping, but you've got like a gallon jug that you're also just pouring into the sink.

Right.

So there are some backup systems in place, other ways that the body can get rid of aldehydes, but they have traditionally been thought of as backup systems, secondary, maybe not as effective.

So it's not like the poison will build up and suddenly you will just dissolve into a sludge of aldehydes and you will cease to exist.

Eventually, this will all break down.

But basically, you can think of it as people with this mutation are

sort of stewing in poison a little bit longer than people who have functional copies of this aldehyde cleanup system.

Yeah, I think the main thrust of that argument is just that it is absolutely bizarre that there are so many flushers around today.

Half a billion people, that is absolutely bonkers for a mutation that not only makes it difficult to drink, but raises your baseline risk of a bunch of health conditions that are not benign.

esophageal cancer, certain kinds of cardiovascular disease.

This is not a fun thing to have.

I mean, you are basically walking around as a human that has a lot more poison sitting in their tissues, which isn't generally something that evolution selects for.