FIGURE-conscious tipplers beware: slimline tonic and other diet mixers can leave you distinctly light-headed, Australian researchers claimed this week.

They have discovered that artificial sweeteners used in diet mixers can significantly accelerate the speed at which your body absorbs alcohol.

Not only can you get drunk faster, you also get significantly more pixilated, says the study by the Royal Adelaide Hospital. The lead researcher, Chris Rayner, told the Digestive Disease Week conference in Los Angeles that the artificial sweetening agents in low-calorie mixers speed up “gastric emptying”.

His study of eight men who drank vodka with either diet or ordinary mixers found that their stomachs absorbed the low-cal mix nearly 25 per cent faster. The diet drinks also helped to send their peak blood-alcohol levels more than 25 per cent higher.

Dr Rayner says it is ironic that “more and more people are shifting their personal preferences by choosing ‘diet’ drinks as a healthier alternative”. He warns, too, that people usually drink mixed spirits when they aren’t eating, so diet drinks often also boost the dreaded empty-stomach syndrome.

He wants to see low-cal mixers carry warnings of their booze-boosting effect.

Body&Soul award

BODY&SOUL, The Times supplement, has won the Patient Information of the Year award from the Patients Association, the advocacy group founded by Claire Rayner that campaigns for better healthcare. It was sponsored by CB-Training.

This award was for a publication, newsletter or helpline. Body&Soul won for “excellent, informative and responsible journalism”. The judges said: “Body&Soul does not focus overly on negativity and balances realism with positive stories and advice. Week after week, it combines good journalism with clinical accuracy and in-depth features, as well as the ‘specials’ it produces.”

Below the salt

ASTHMATICS may be made to breathe easier if they are sent down into salt mines, claim Finnish allergy experts.

The doctors wanted to see if there was any worth in the old complementary practice of getting asthmatics to sit in natural salt caves and mines.

They report in Allergy how they put 32 chronic asthma patients in a salt-coated chamber, which simulates the mines’ air, for 40 minutes a day. After two weeks the patients’ lungs were much less likely to show allergic “hyper-responsiveness” to their environment, the South Karelia Hospital doctors say.

They add that salt-chamber therapy may prove a handy add-on to conventional medicine, though they warn that building the special rooms is beyond the home DIY-er.

Stem the flow

STRESS incontinence, a condition that affects about three million British women a year and frequently occurs as a side-effect of childbirth, can be cured using injections of stem cells, claim investigators.

The condition often leaves women afraid to laugh, cough or sneeze in public. But now a team of doctors in Canada and America says that it has achieved good results from the first human clinical trials in which stem cells from the muscles in women’s thighs have been injected near the valves of their bladders.

Five of the seven women who participated in the study reported improvements in their bladder control and quality of life, the researchers told the American Urological Association this week. Follow-up studies are planned to refine the procedure for widespread use.

Eat your evergreens

WARWICK University scientists are tracking a gene that might make broccoli stay fresh for three days longer. This may end the sad sight of your veg gone brown in the fridge after you forgot to cook it. Or, at least, you’ll have three more days in which to forget.

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