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Beating the hangover blues
The best way to counter drinking's effects depends on whom you ask.
By Shari Rudavsky
December 30, 2004
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all know the best way to avoid a hangover: Don't drink in the first place.
But often that solution only occurs to you the morning after. After one too many drinks, after that oh-so-embarrassing comment, and yes, during that pounding headache and churning stomach.
So, what to do once you've overindulged?
Traditional remedies abound, from reaching for Tylenol to chugging coffee to guzzling water. And some new products on the market promise to prevent hangovers, with one hitch -- you must take them as you drink.
From the trenches, aka the bars and nightclubs, come these suggestions: Drink anything, as long as it isn't alcoholic. Drink milk. Drink Gatorade. Drink soda. Drink orange juice.
"Just try to get something down," advises Simon Robinson, a managing partner at Nicky Blaine's, the Downtown restaurant known for its martinis. And if that doesn't work, Robinson offers another tip: Place an icepack on your head.
At Binkley's Kitchen and Bar, 5902 N. College Ave., which promises "sympathetic bartenders" on its marquee, Samantha Simpson, one such bartender, recommends bitters and soda. Or for the more intrepid: a raw egg and tomato juice, salt and pepper, and a piece of celery.
Vince Da Puzzo, beverage director with Vizion Restaurant/Vapour Lounge in Castleton, has a carefully scripted approach developed over years of practice: A bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich with a handful of potato chips and a huge Pepsi.
"Eat the sandwich right when you get up. And in a perfect world, your mom makes it," he says. "This works. I swear."
All these food-based remedies may well work, says Leonard Harris, executive director of the Greater Indianapolis Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence. Drinking depletes the body of needed nutrients and minerals, so eating a well-balanced breakfast and consuming vitamin-rich food can help restore the body's natural balance.
"It's our body's way of telling you, 'You've been overworking me,' " says Harris, who recommends a time-release multivitamin to replenish those lost nutrients and ease the hangover. "It's the same reason you find a crowd pouring out of the bars into a waffle house."
That's precisely the theory behind the Barton's Cafe's annual Hangover Breakfast. For the fifth year in a row, the Northeastside eatery will open on New Year's Day from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., serving specials like eggs benedict, eggs florentine, and the "hungry hoosier," a small sample of everything on the menu.
"You always need a good breakfast after you drink," said cafe owner Dana Fitzgerald. "We serve all the remedies to make you feel better from your hangover."
For people unwilling to try a food remedy, the Beyond Light Medi-Spa in Greenwood provides oxygen treatments that some clients rely on to shake the aftereffects of alcohol.
A few sniffs of filtered oxygen, and the hangover headache is gone, says Barbara Parrish, a nurse at the Medi-Spa.
Although the oxygen bar, which also treats people with migraines, is normally open only from Tuesday to Saturday, staff there tries to meet the needs of clients who call and say, "I'm going out partying -- can you open Sunday morning?" Parrish says.
Is it worth $5?
Usually it takes about 10 minutes of oxygen, at 50 cents a minute, to relieve the headache.
All these may sound very good, but experts scoff at the notion that any of these works particularly well.
"If we truly had something for hangover relief, everyone would know about it and everyone would be using it," says Anne Reese, director of health and wellness education at the Indiana University Health Center in Bloomington. "What's going to work is time and more time and eventually it will be over."
Nobody's sure exactly what causes a hangover, but Dr. Jeffrey Wiese, an associate professor of medicine at Tulane who has studied the subject for the past decade, says that three major components contribute.
First, alcohol dehydrates the drinker -- so any of those remedies that aim towards rehydration helps. Eating salty food like chicken soup might also help because the salt will cause your body to retain water, Wiese says.
Second, excessive drinking disrupts your sleep, Wiese says. As the alcohol's sedating effects wears off, your brain rebounds in activity. This process won't wake most people up, but it will prevent their brains from entering restful sleep.
"Even though you may be in bed nine hours, you will wake up feeling groggy and tired," Wiese says. "That's a function of only having the equivalent of one to three hours of deep sleep."
The third factor that likely produces that hangover sensation is inflammation of the entire body. How the alcohol achieves that is the million-dollar question, Wiese says.
Likely culprits are substances known as congeners, impurities in the alcohol that are a byproduct of the fermentation process. While these congeners, found in greater quantities in darker liquors, such as bourbon or tequila and called tannins in wines, give the drink its taste, they may also increase the chance of a worse hangover, Wiese says.
A head start
Two relatively new products on the market aim to prevent hangovers before they even begin. Although no independent scientific studies validate the claims of the companies that make them, both Chaser and RU-21 have attracted fans who swear by them.
Chaser -- caplets that you swallow with your first drink -- strives to absorb and thereby disarm those congeners before they do their damage.
Made of calcium and charcoal, Chaser caplets trap the congeners in the digestive tract before they make their way into the bloodstream, where they can do the most damage, promises Living Essentials, the Walled Lake, Mich.-based company that developed Chaser.
One company-sponsored study found that Chaser helped prevent 17 common symptoms of hangovers, including nausea, vomiting and headache.
But Chaser won't turn a designated drinker into a designated driver. The caplets will not completely prevent the alcohol from entering the bloodstream, says Carl Sperber, a company spokesman, so intoxication can still occur.
While RU-21, another pill that you take while you're drinking, also does not promise to prevent intoxication altogether, it can alleviate the effects of too much alcohol, says Emil Chiaberi, CEO of Spirit Sciences, the Beverly Hills, Calif., company behind RU-21.
Hangovers do not just result from congeners, the company says, but also from a buildup of acetaldehyde, a toxic compound created when the body breaks down alcohol. RU-21 slows the metabolic process so there's less acetaldehyde in the first place, and it speeds up the compound's decomposition, the company says.
Like Chaser, however, it works only if taken while drinking.
"That's why we recommend not drinking too much, so you can remember to take it," Chiaberi says.
The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, a nonprofit organization based in New York, sees little to no value in these and other remedies to alleviate hangovers.
None of them addresses the darker sides of excessive drinking like impaired driving or increased violence.
"It may be nice to be able to mitigate the uncomfortable consequences of drinking," says Ames Sweet, the Council's communications director, "but I think it gives people a false sense of security."
Other damaging factors
Nor do any of these remove the physical damage that repeated hangovers can do.
Research shows that people who experience more than one hangover a month have a two- to threefold increased risk of heart attack, even if they have no prior heart disease, Wiese says.
And even those who offer remedies recognize we're probably fooling ourselves if we think they work.
"You feel like you're doing something for it, but there is no cure for a hangover," says Nicky Blaine's Robinson. "If there was, people probably would have invented it by now."
back
A recent survey shows it takes an average of just 3.2 drinks to cause
hangover symptoms. For 10 percent of people it takes one or two.
What causes hangovers? The main culprit is congeners.
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