When you think of alcohol, it is hard to associate it with a particular group of people. Alcohol spans across, men, women, blacks, whites, hispanics, asians, young, old, and religions across the world. Alcohol has the ability to bring people together or tear people apart, it affects everyone differently no matter who you are or where you come from.
Your race can actually play a part on how alcohol affects your body. It has to do with enzymes and how they break down the alcohol once it enters your system. There are certain races like Asians, that have more trouble processing alcohol and therefore get sick on low levels and tend to drink less. If you are an American Indian, your body is more likely to be missing some of these enzymes and you are at a higher risk of becoming an alcoholic. Since this does not apply to everyone in the race, you don't hear about these generalizations very often.
When looking at different races, Blacks and Hispanics have the highest alcohol related side effects over Whites, Asians and Native Americans. Blacks and Hispanics appear in studies to have more non-health alcohol related problems. This could also be related to other social aspects like lower income brackets, unhealthy environments, and poor peer influence. Medically, liver disease is more prevalent, cancer is wider spread, fetal alcohol syndrome, and mortality rates are highest for blacks over all other minority races.
References:
Chartier, Karen & Caetano, Raul. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Ethnicity and health disparities in alcohol research. Retrieved from http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/ arh40/152-160.htm
Lords of the Drinks (2013). Why indians are alcoholics and asians can't drink. Retrieved from http://lordsofthedrinks.com/2013/06/24/why-indians-are-alcoholics-and-asians-cant-drink/
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