Want to drink and not get drunk? Try a horse chestnut or two, some snakeroot or maybe a camellia seed cocktail.

Japanese scientists reported this week that those traditional Chinese medicines used for centuries to treat arthritis, diabetes and stomach ills appear to have the ability to grab alcohol and route it through the digestive system before it can be absorbed into the blood stream.

"No matter how much you drink, you would not get drunk,'' Masayuki Yoshikawa of Kyoto Pharmaceutical University said. "If you consume this before you have alcohol...the blood alcohol will not increase, in fact it will decrease.'' The effect has been tested so far only on laboratory rats given one of four traditional compounds an hour before they downed an ethanol cocktail. The rats had from zero to one-fifth the amount of blood alcohol as other rats not given the preventive medicine.

Yoshikawa reported his findings through a translator at a news conference during the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Chicago. He said human tests have not yet been done but he has been approached by commercial interests and expected that private industry would carry the research beyond lab animals.

His study involved four remedies that he said have been used for thousands of years in the Orient and beyond with no apparent adverse side effects.

They are the bark and root cortex of the angelica tree, the plant ovary of the soapberry, the seeds of the camellia and horse chestnut and the roots of the seneca snakeroot.

Of the four, Yoshikawa said, angelica seems to have the strongest effect in absorbing alcohol. The mechanism by which that is accomplished, he added, is not yet understood, but the effect is to trap the alcohol and move it into the large intestine without absorption into the blood stream.

More than 100 traditional Chinese medicines, he said, are believed to prevent alcohol toxicity. Snakeroot and horse chestnut have also been used in Western medicines, he said.

"I regard this...as a good medicine to prevent acute alcoholism,'' he said of the compounds studied.

*** So many beneficial effects have been found from drinking wine in moderation, meanwhile, that its alcoholic content may be better defined as a nutrient than a drug, a researcher said this week.

"Ethanol increases the level of the so-called `good' HDL cholesterol,'' Linda Bisson of the University of California at Davis said. "However, the effect of ethanol on cholesterol is predicted to account for only a fraction of the impact on cardiovascular health.'' In a report delivered to the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Chicago, she said the ethanol in wine should be considered a macronutrient rather than a drug. Both red and white wines (particularly Chardonnay) are beneficial to people with high cholesterol levels, she said.

"The effect of ethanol on metabolism of other energy sources may in part explain its effect in the reduction of coronary heart disease,'' Bisson explained.

A separate report, also from the University of California at Davis, said red wine appears to delay the onset of tumours in test animals.