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For as long as humans have drunk alcohol,
we’ve also been looking for relief from hangovers.
Unfortunately, we don’t know how to cure them yet ----- or at least, nothing definitive.
But we know a lot more about how to make sure you wake up with a hangover, so avoiding some
of these behaviors will hopefully ease that morning-after headache.
This one may seem obvious, but you can’t get an alcohol-induced hangover without alcohol,
or more technically, ethanol.
And while that seems silly to say, booze is the only consistent theme in our definition
of a hangover.
That’s because everyone’s hangover symptoms are different — ranging from a little bit
of queasiness to brain-melting headaches.
So when researchers study hangovers, they’ll usually characterize it as a number of symptoms
that follow alcohol consumption and metabolism -- headaches, fatigue, nausea, and so on.
Then those symptoms have to get bad enough to disrupt your daily life.
But our methods for measuring hangovers, or predicting their occurrence, can be hit or
miss.
By the time you wake up with your head full of regret, your body has already metabolized,
or processed, the ethanol into sugar and a few byproducts.
And one of our current best guesses for what causes hangovers is a chemical called acetaldehyde,
one of those ethanol byproducts.
When we try to block the metabolism of acetaldehyde using drugs, symptoms get worse.
This implies the higher the concentration of acetaldehyde in your body, the worse the
symptoms .
But even that’s not entirely certain, because acetaldehyde is metabolized into acetate really
quickly.
So in 2010, researchers tested ethanol and acetate separately in rats, and tried to measure
hangover-like headaches.
A few hours after giving the rats each substance, researchers applied different levels of pressure
to the rats’ heads and looked for /some/ kind of response that indicated the rats felt
the poke.
And with both substances it took less and less force to produce a headache.
But as far as we can tell, no one’s tried feeding acetate to humans yet.
With such a fuzzy understanding behind the cause of hangovers, you can imagine how hard
it is to study, especially in people.
Research is often done by surveying people after a night of drinking, and variables like
how long participants drank, and how strong their drinks were, vary wildly between studies.
Plus, even controlled studies are rarely blinded.
It’s theoretically possible, though beyond a certain amount of alcohol, participants
generally know they’re getting drunk.
Even though hangovers are so hard to study, we can look into things that affect the hangover
itself.
For instance, a common piece of advice says that you should never drink on an empty stomach
-- unless you want a hangover.
And that’s totally true!
In a classic 1994 study out of Sweden, researchers had ten men fast overnight, then gave them
either a moderate dose of alcohol on an empty stomach, or fed them a hearty breakfast along
with it.
Sure enough, the participants who drank on an empty stomach /felt/ drunker and had a
higher blood alcohol concentration in the hours after drinking.
The breakfast group also cleared alcohol from their blood more quickly, suggesting that
the presence of food sped up alcohol metabolism.
So make sure you have something in your stomach before drinking, and while you’re at it,
make sure to avoid smoking too.
I mean, that’s just good advice in general.
Researchers in 2013 had college students keep a log of their alcohol and tobacco use for
8 weeks alongside a record of their hangover symptoms.
Not surprisingly, hangover symptoms were the worst on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
But they were also worse after smoking cigarettes.
And the number of cigarettes mattered — as long as the participants drank above a certain
amount of alcohol, more smoking lent itself to more severe hangover symptoms on average.
So even if you only smoke when you drink, you’re still more likely to suffer the next
morning.
The last thing that can make a hangover particularly nasty is the non-ethanol part of your drink
-- a group of chemicals called congeners.
These are things other than ethanol that are produced during beverage fermentation, like
acetone, tannins, and other chemicals.
And drinks with more congeners have been shown to lead to worse hangovers.
For example, bourbon has a higher concentration of congeners than vodka.
Bourbon has also been shown to produce more severe hangovers than vodka.
But the science is actually kind of mixed.
For example, researchers in older studies had pointed to one particular congener -- methanol
-- for hangover symptoms.
But more recent experiments have shown otherwise.
For example, a 2017 study showed that urine methanol concentration was /not/ correlated
with hangover severity.
We’re talking self-reported hangover severity, mind you, so it’s hard to measure anyway.
So at the end of the day, to avoid a hangover, that common sense advice is the best we’ve
got: skip cigarettes, not meals.
Or don’t drink in the first place.
Otherwise, you might be in for one heck of a headache.
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