A real-life experiment with booze-busting miracle tablets for the Wimborne rugby football club: a case study of the WIRED project on Christmas night out
Downing Flaming Sambuca shots at last call may seem like a good idea at the time, but come sunrise your body most likely won’t be thanking you for it. The new wave of pre-drink supplements promises to fight this and lighten the burden of the inevitable after drinking a few drinks.
Store shelves are packed with so-called hangover cures. There is no proof that they work. In 2020, researchers published what they called the “world’s largest randomised double-blind placebo-controlled” trial of supplements containing vitamins, minerals, plant extracts and antioxidants and found no real improvement in hangover symptoms.
WIRED wanted to see whether the miracle tablets had any beneficial effects on us. And the only obvious way was to test them in a real-life situation.
The Wimborne Rugby Football Club team is based in the UK. We tagged along on their Christmas party night out and plied willing volunteers with a selection of different booze-busting options, keen to see whether they could, in fact, minimize the effects of an excessive night of food and alcoholic beverages.
Living Well, But Better: How Drinking Alcohol Can Prevent Your Hangover and How It Can Make You Sick, And How To Get Up After Your Drinking
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“The ancient Greeks believed that eating cabbage could cure a hangover, and the Romans thought that a meal of fried canaries would do the trick,” said Dr. John Brick, former chief of research at the Center of Alcohol Studies, Education and Training Division at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who authored “The Doctor’s Hangover Handbook.”
“A person must wait for the body to finish clearing the toxic byproducts of alcohol metabolism, to rehydrate, to heal irritated tissue, and to restore immune and brain activity to normal,” according to the institute. That recovery process can take up to 24 hours.
There are things you can do to make your transition easier. Possibly, experts say, but many common hangover “cures” may make your hangover worse. Here’s how to separate fact from fiction.
The reason some people believe it works is because once the calming effects of alcohol pass, the brain on a hangover is overstimulated. (It’s also the reason you wake up in the middle of the night once your body has metabolized alcohol.)
“You’ve got this hyperexcitability in the brain after the alcohol is gone,” said Dr. Robert Swift, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island.
The answer is yes, depending on hangover symptoms, Brick said. If you skip your morning cup of joe, you could end up having a coffee craving on top of a bad night of partying.
According to Brick, coffee can cause irritation to the stomach lining. Coffee can make you sick if you are queasy.
Forget eating a greasy breakfast in the wee hours after a night of drinking — you’re adding insult to injury, Swift said: “Greasy food is harder to digest, so it’s probably good to avoid it.”
greasy food is not a very good choice for eating. We drink alcohol that is a result of sugars, starches and ferments, usually grape or berry. It may make some tasty beverages, but it’s also a solvent.
The absorption of alcohol can be slowed by eating food that is very high in vitamins and minerals. The less rapid the alcohol is to your brain, the slower it will get to you.
Dehydration is one of the main reasons why a headache might be due to a loss of electrolytes and blood vessels in the body.
If you’ve vomited, you’ve lost even more electrolytes, and all of this can lead to fatigue, confusion, irregular heart rate, digestive problems and more.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/01/health/hangover-myths-and-facts-wellness/index.html
Eating Disorderously: How to Avoid Inflammation in the Stomach and Other Associated Effects of Alcohol and Alcoholic Becays
It’s possible to take a lot of pain meds if you’re drunk. Taking an acetaminophen, such as Tylenol, can further damage your overtaxed liver, while aspirin and ibuprofen can irritate your stomach lining.
“Even though they tend to be anti-inflammatory in the body, they can cause inflammation in the stomach,” Swift said. They should always be taken with food and anti-inflammatories.
“Before you go to sleep and when you wake up, drink as much water as you comfortably can handle,” he said. Before you hit the shower in the morning, you can take a multivitamin to replenish vitamins and minerals.
The effects of alcohol and alcoholic beverages are so complex that no solution would address all of them.