Blood Alcohol Concentration: What Does It Mean?
17 January, 2022
Responsible alcohol consumption starts with understanding how alcohol affects your body and how you can control consumption. Any amount of alcohol can directly impact the blood alcohol concentration. The blood alcohol concentration also called blood alcohol content (BAC), is the amount of alcohol in your blood. The BAC means your alcohol level or degree of intoxication. The more you consume alcohol, the higher your BAC gets and the more intoxicated you feel. Knowing your BAC before driving can help keep yourself and others safe from potential accidents.
The BAC is the standard unit to determine how much alcohol is in the system in alcohol tests. BAC is the weight of ethanol in grams for every 100ml of blood or 210 litres of breath. For example, a BAC of 0.05% means you have 0.05g of alcohol per 100ml of blood. In New Zealand, 0.05% BAC is the legal driving limit for alcohol consumption. Therefore, you are legally intoxicated if your BAC is 0.05% or higher. Furthermore, you can face criminal charges or severe penalties if police catch you driving over the legal BAC limit. An excellent way to avoid drink driving or road mishaps is to know your alcohol level through personal breathalysers. A device like a BACtrack personal breathalyser can quickly and easily perform breath tests to measure your blood alcohol concentration.
What can affect your Blood Alcohol Concentration
Many factors can affect your BAC. Each person reacts differently to alcohol. It is hard to tell how high your BAC can go based on the number of standard drinks you consume alone. Weight, gender, body fat distribution, water composition, and metabolism rate play a vital role in your BAC. Additionally, individual factors such as medication and food intake can also affect your blood alcohol concentration. Therefore, you should use breathalysers to measure your BAC, rather than just guessing. In general, a 0.05% BAC level means impairment of reasoning, motor functions, reflexes, and memory loss.
Having severe alcohol-induced impairments can make you more prone to accidents or road crashes. However, even minor impairments can still lead to collisions. Driving with any alcohol amount in your system is never recommended. BACtrack personal breathalysers help you monitor your blood alcohol concentration to stay at a safe level. BACtrack breathalysers use advanced fuel cell sensors to measure your BAC accurately. These are the same sensors that you can find in a police officer’s breathalyser. Moreover, BACtrack’s simple one-button operations can let you know your alcohol level in 10 to 15 seconds. Breathalysers can help inform you on when and how long you should wait before you can drive. Waiting for alcohol to leave your body can help improve your safety and prevent potential trouble with the law.
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