Jews, Genetics and Addiction
Growing up, I was taught that Jewish people couldn’t be alcoholics. That was a bit of wishful thinking. The people who taught me this rationalized it by saying that the Sabbath Kiddush socialized us in such a way as alcohol became something used only in a religious way. This never made sense to me as several Christian religions have sacramental use of wine and they didn’t report lower frequencies of alcoholism. So I just passed the whole thing off as a cultural myth and went about my business.
It turns out that Jews do have a lower frequency of alcoholism, but it has nothing to do with the religion or the culture. It’s in the genes.
As alcohol is processed in the body it is first turned from ethanol to ethylaldehyde on it’s way to becoming acetic acid. Ethylaldehyde, like formaldehyde, is not something the body likes, but it isn’t there long or in great quantities when the average person takes a drink. However a point mutation in the enzyme that turns ethanol into ethylaldehyde makes the enzyme run very fast and makes more ethylaldehyde than the body can process. It also gets rid of the ethanol more quickly. So someone with that mutation gets less enjoyment from alcohol and more of the aldehyde with its negative effects, it would sort of be like taking antabuse.
This point mutation is very rare in Europeans, occuring in less than 5%. In east Asians it is very common with more than 90% of Japanese and Chinese having at least one copy of the mutated gene. In Jews the prevalence is greater than 20% or more than 4 times higher than a European population. In fact more and more genetic studies are coming out showing Jews of European ancestry to be genetically more like a Middle Eastern population than a European one. (A professor from Jerusalem is hoping to ignite a grassroots peace process by showing that the Palestinian population are actually the Jews left by the Romans to man the farms in the area. It’s a fascinating topic with a lot of evidence but too much to get into here.)
So as Europeans go, a greater percentage of Ashkenazi Jews than normal “get no kick from Champagne.” This really would lower the prevelence of alcoholism in the Jewish population. However it doesn’t say much about Addiction in general.
If you look at Addiction as the addictions, depending on what drug the person uses, all you need to do is avoid the drug and you can’t get the addiction. But what if Addiction is one disease with multiple drugs? What if compulsive overeating and heroin addiction have the same common cause in the brain? That would mean that being protected from over drinking doesn’t protect someone from the illness called Addiction. This has become an important idea because recent findings at the National Institute of Drug Abuse show the same PET scan results in obese compulsive overeaters, alcoholics, cocaine addicts and heroin addicts.
There is no evidence that the disease of Addiction, taken together in all it forms, varies from population to population. The drug used does and some of that is genetic, but the genetic causes of Addiction seem to be old enough and strong enough to span across all human populations equally.