How long does it take alcohol to leave the system?

[Caveat]

... told me it would take weeks for him to work it out of his system...

This doesn't sound believable to me.

A bit like the old 'Bruce Lee's body was so fit and pure that it was an aspirin that killed him'

 

[mathepac]

i would imagine everyone has some small amount of alcohol in their system ...

It would generally be very small. There may be rare instances where breathalyser detectable levels of ethyl alcohol are generated by the body, so-called auto-brew syndrome, but these are very rare and studies (Japan and the US that I am aware of) indicate common traits amongst the individuals where this happens -

• they are middle-aged
• with gastrointestinal problems which have
• had surgery and
• have developed a yeast infection of some kind.

In general, normal healthy people don't ferment sugars to ethyl alcohol in readily detectable quantities. As soon as the presence of alcohol is detected our bodies begin to metabolise it in our stomachs and livers with an enzyme which triggers a process that goes -

Alcohol -> acetaldehyde -> acetic acid -> water & carbon dioxide

 

[olddog]

i would imagine everyone has some small amount of alcohol in their system even teetotallers,fruit or veg will ferment in the stomach.

Yes, that is true

Detecting very low levels of alcohol in the system is a vexed matter with Aircraft pilots

There are many threads on www.pprune.org on the topic

For example

http://www.pprune.org/questions/304404-alcohol-limit-pilots.html

 

[dewdrop]

Maybe in the interests of healt there should be some comment about the damage that can be done when alcohol leaves the system. I am a regular pint man myself!