Driving Under the Influence of......Bread?
Phil Price, a good friend and nationally known DUI attorney in Montgomery, Alabama, conducted an interesting series of tests with one of the most commonly used breath testing machines, an Intoxilyer 5000. Without consuming any alcoholic beverages, he submitted himself to repeated breath testing -- after eating various types of food. His findings were startling.
After consuming almost any type of bread product -- white loaf bread, donuts, pretzels, pastries, etc. -- Price consistently registered blood-alcohol readings on the machine. These levels were commonly around .03%, but rose as high as .05% (enough, in conjunction with a drink or two, to reach illegal levels). Further, the Intoxilyzer's slope detector (an electrical circuit designed to detect alcohol from the mouth rather than from the lungs) failed to indicate the presence of any "mouth alcohol". He reported this in an article entitled "Intoxilyzer: A Bread Testing Device?", 15(4) Drinking/Driving Law Letter 52 (1996).
Reacting to the use of this article by defense attorneys in their state, the Washington State Toxicology Laboratory conducted their own studies to refute the findings -- this time with the machine used in Washington, a DataMaster. Unfortunately, their research only confimed Price's experience. As reported in Logan and Distefano, "Ethanol Content of Various Foods and Soft Drinks and their Potential for Interference with a Breath-Alcohol Test", 22 Journal of Analytical Toxicology 18 (1998), a variety of breads and soft drinks were tested and found to contain no alcohol. Alcohol-free subjects then ingested these products and provided breath samples into a DataMaster. The researchers' conclusions:
We found that, particularly at low concentrations but as high as 0.046g/210L, mouth alcohol rather than expiratory breath alcohol may be reported as apparent true breath alcohol...
In other words, alcohol-free subjects who consumed bread or soft drinks were causing the machines to read up to .05% blood alcohol concentrations (readings are rounded off to closest 1/100th percentile). Furthermore, the slope detection system failed to screen the effects of mouth alcohol from alcohol coming from the lungs:
It is evident from these results that the slope detector feature was unable to distinguish mouth-alcohol concentrations at these very low levels.
What caused bread to register on breath machines as alcohol? The theory of the state lab's experts:
Most baked products with listed contents indicating they contained yeast did in fact have some alcohol present. Alcohol is produced by the fermentation process in yeasts by their action on simple sugars used in preparing the dough....Although most of the alcohol in the dough is lost during the baking process, some is evidently retained in the matrix of the bread...
Parenthetically, there exists additional scientific literature reporting intoxication in animals eating dough and sourdough. Suter, "Presumed Ethanol Intoxication in Sheep Dogs Fed Uncooked Pizza Dough", 69(1) Australian Veterinary Journal 20 (1990); Thrall, et al., "Ethanol Toxicosis Secondary to Sourdough Ingestion in a Dog", 184(12) Journal of American Veterinary Medical Association 1513 (1984).
The effects of bread on breathalyzers is not just an interesting anecdote. The significance of these findings should be apparent. First, bread dough tends to stick between the teeth and remain there for extended periods of time to be breathed into a breathalyzer; it also absorbs alcohol while there. Second, although it is not illegal to drive with a .04% blood alcohol level, adding one or two drinks to the bread reading could raise that above the illegal .08% level.
Posted by Lawrence Taylor on 03/08/2005 Read

THE LULU OF THE WEEK: BREAD GIVES YOU KIDNEY CANCER
Journal abstract below:
Food groups and renal cell carcinoma: A case-control study from Italy
By Francesca Bravi et al.
Although nutrition and diet have been related to renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the role of specific foods or nutrients on this cancer is still controversial. We evaluated the relation between a wide range of foods and the risk of RCC in an Italian case-control study including 767 patients (494 men and 273 women) younger than 79 years with incident, histologically confirmed RCC, and 1,534 controls (988 men and 546 women) admitted to the same hospitals as cases for a wide spectrum of acute, non-neoplastic conditions, not related to long term diet modifications. A validated and reproducible food frequency questionnaire, including 78 foods and beverages, plus a separate section on alcohol drinking, was used to assess patients' dietary habits 2 years before diagnosis or hospital admission. Multivariate odds ratios (OR) were obtained after allowance for energy intake and other major confounding factors. A significant direct trend in risk was found for bread (OR = 1.94 for the highest versus the lowest intake quintile), and a modest excess of risk was observed for pasta and rice (OR = 1.29), and milk and yoghurt (OR = 1.27). Poultry (OR = 0.74), processed meat (OR = 0.64) and vegetables (OR = 0.65) were inversely associated with RCC risk. No relation was found for coffee and tea, soups, eggs, red meat, fish, cheese, pulses, potatoes, fruits, desserts and sugars. The results of this study provide further indications on dietary correlates of RCC, and in particular indicate that a diet rich in refined cereals and poor in vegetables may have an unfavorable role on RCC.
(From International Journal of Cancer, 2006)
There appears to have been no control for socioeconimic status so at a quick guess I suspect that the authors have simply shown once again that the poor have poorer health. I don't know a lot about Italian dietary habits but I suspect that the poor eat more bread and the rich eat more meat. The journal must be very careless of its reputation to publish such rubbish.
Statistical note: The use of odds ratios and reliance on extreme quintiles can obscure that fact that the differences in the means were very small and may obscure not-uncommon curvilinear relationships. I would hazard a guess that if the relationship had been expressed as a biserial correlation between bread consumption and patient group the relationship would have been shown as very weak indeed. And weak relationships tend to be poorly replicable
Read