Fact check: does drinking alcohol help with a hangover?
From fried eggs with bacon to a liter of water before bed. After years of field research, I still haven’t figured out what the best remedy is for those (increasingly severe) royal hangovers. Yet one remedy seems to prove itself time and time again…
Pounding head, trembling hands, turning over with a sigh and a groan, only to turn back two seconds later because your new position makes you feel nauseous. Hangovers. I’ve had them in all shapes and sizes.
In the battle against those hangovers, I’ve also tried my fair share of hangover remedies. Okay, I passed on suggestions like drinking pickle juice and rubbing lemon under my armpits, but running to ‘sweat it out,’ taking cold showers, painkillers and drinking water… I’ve tried them all.
Recovery beer
And yet, nothing works quite as well as a recovery beer. Or a glass of wine. Or any other alcoholic beverage. The English call it ‘hair of the dog.’ A lot of people complain about it, but it doesn’t seem healthy to me. Is it a placebo? Or does it really work? I decided to investigate.
And what do you know? Although most of the ‘evidence’ is anecdotal, there is indeed scientific evidence that a drink can help with your hangover symptoms the next morning. Yes, really.
How it works
It’s a bit technical, but here’s how it works: alcohol contains a tiny amount of methanol—a highly chemical substance. In your body, it is converted into formaldehyde, a toxic substance that can make you feel so awful the next day (the hangover symptoms).
But because your body only switches to metabolizing methanol once all the ethanol (alcohol) has been metabolized, drinking alcohol therefore works as a kind of diversionary maneuver. The new drink supplies new ethanol for the enzymes in your body to process, leaving the methanol alone and allowing it to be excreted in your urine without being converted into formaldehyde.
What should you drink?
Now, of course, I don’t want to encourage anyone to develop an alcohol problem—because let’s be honest… if you aren’t careful, you’ll simply be dealing with the same problem again the next day—but the ‘best’ drink for killing your hangover is vodka. Vodka contains relatively little methanol, after all. Could that explain the popularity of the Bloody Mary at boozy Sunday brunch? Perhaps. Does that sound a little too intense? A vodka and orange juice works too, and you’ll get some vitamins in at the same time.
Spoiler
One small caveat, though: the study providing this scientific evidence concerns people who had more or less drunk a bottle of spirits, then underwent gastric lavage, received activated charcoal treatment and intravenous fluids, followed by hemodialysis, and then had ethanol injected into them. So, well, whether you should really take this as an example… the best hangover cure is still simply not drinking too much. Lame, but true. Well… cheers!
Also read:
- Recovery beer, anyone?
- It’s scientifically proven: this really helps with a hangover
- What (star) chefs eat when they have a hangover
