A person's BAC will go down if they: drink coffee, take a cold shower, or vomit.

BAC, short for “Blood Alcohol Concentration” is the percentage of alcohol in a person’s bloodstream. For example, if a person’s BAC is at .10%, that means that for every 1000 parts of blood, the person contains one part of alcohol.

The legal intoxication percentage in most countries is .08%+, so that means if your BAC is higher than .08%, you’re legally intoxicated. Recently, there’s been a debate about whether taking a cold shower, drinking coffee, or vomiting can lower your BAC or not.

Some sources claim that it does, but are they correct? “A person’s BAC will go down if they: drink coffee, take a cold shower, or vomit. In this article, we’ll elaborate on that. We’ll list the factors that determine the BAC in a person as well. So, to find out if these rumors/claims are correct or not, keep reading this article.

What determines the BAC level?

There are a few factors that determine the BAC level in an individual. They’ve all been listed below:

The number of standard drinks a person has had.
The gender of the person, and their body weight.
The medications they’re using.
The food they consume.
And the time allotted to consume the standard drinks.

Standard drinks:

Below is a list of standard drinks with their percentage of alcohol.

One 12 oz. regular beer with 4.5% alcohol.
Once 7 0z. malt liquor with 7% alcohol.
One 5 oz. a glass of wine with 12% alcohol.
One 1.5 oz. shot of hard liquor with 40% alcohol.
One-third jigger (.5 oz.) of Everclear with 95% alcohol.

More than one standard drink

A cup of beer containing 16 oz. equals 1.4 drinks.
40 oz. of beer equals 3.6 drinks.
A glass of wine containing 22 oz equals 3 drinks.
A margarita containing 12 oz. equals 2-4 drinks, varying from ingredient to ingredient.
A cup of trashcan punch containing 12 oz. equals 4-10 drinks depending on the ingredients used.

These are the factors that determine the BAC levels in an individual.

Will a person’s BAC go down if they:

A: Drink Coffee B: Take a Cold Shower C: Vomit

For those wondering whether vomiting, drinking coffee, or taking a cold shower lowers that percentage, then they’re completely wrong. A person’s BAC will not go down if they drink coffee, take a cold shower, or vomit.

There’s only one way it’ll go down, and that’s naturally done by your body. You’re completely wrong if you do believe that these things will lower your BAC. The one way it will go down, is through a person’s liver. Your liver will lower your BAC content over time and the amount of time it’ll take depends on the percentage of your BAC.

As for coffee, it’ll keep you awake, but won’t lower your alcohol content. A cold shower does nothing, and while vomiting doesn’t lower your BAC content, it’ll keep it from going up. So, in a way, vomiting does help with your BAC level, although no one’s going to recommend it.

So, that answers your question. Your liver is the only thing that can lower your BAC content, and nothing else.

Conclusion:

Many sources have claimed that a person’s BAC will go down if they: drink coffee, take a cold shower, or vomit. There’s no scientific evidence backing up their claim, so it’s pretty obvious that they’re completely wrong. Vomiting does do something about it, but that has nothing to do with lowering your BAC. Vomiting only keeps it from going up.

So, we hope that clears up the misconceptions you’ve had about BAC. We hope you find this article useful, and if you have any further queries, or would like to add something to this article, feel free to comment down below, and we’ll try to respond to as many queries as we can!