Your body can get you drunk without drinking anything

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]A woman was arrested for driving drunk with four times the legal limit in her blood. Two weeks later, she was still testing positive. She hadn't touched a single drop. October 2014, a school teacher from Hamburg, New York is driving with a flat tire. The police pull her over. Breathalyzer, 0.33.

[00:00:17]To get there, a woman would have to drink 12 beers in a row, but she's perfectly sober. Talks fine, walks straight. Her lawyer, Joseph Marusak, decides to investigate. He hires nurses to watch her for 12 hours without alcohol. End of the day, 0.36.

[00:00:33]Then the woman buys her own breathalyzer and records 18 nights in a row testing positive. Zero drops of alcohol.

[00:00:39][snorts and sighs] What she had is something called auto-brewery syndrome.

[00:00:43]Overgrown fungi in the intestine that turn every carb you eat into pure ethanol. Bread, rice, an apple, your own body gets you drunk from the inside. A normal person at 0.40 would be in a coma. She was teaching classes at those levels. In December 2015, the judge dropped the charges. It's not genetic.

[00:01:03]Long-term antibiotics, diabetes, Crohn's, anyone can develop it.