Everything you think you know about hangovers is wrong.
That’s because science hasn’t really studied them much. We know more about outer space than we do about what’s going on with you the morning after you thought it would be clever to down 10 PBRs and dance on a bar. Only 406 out of 658,610 biomedical journal studies listed in a database covered the subject.
We don’t even know what causes a hangover, notes Wired articles editor Adam Rogers in “Proof,” a romp through the world of alcohol.
Science has just begun to study the hangover — it was only in the last few years that researchers even agreed on a definition. So far, though, the labs are working through the various theories like dehydration, the sugar content and the purity of what you drink.
Did you know 23% of people don’t get hangovers? It’s unclear why. But it’s probably a bad thing: Having the gene mutation linked to hangover resistance appears to be linked to . . . alcoholism. Yes, hangovers are a useful little jab in the ribs from Mother Nature.
If you ever reach a .10 on the blood-alcohol content scale, congratulations. Hangover is all but assured — and peak symptoms will occur when your BAC drops back to near zero, or about 12 to 14 hours after peak drunkenness.
Is a hangover just dehydration? Boozing does dry you out — but that isn’t what causes the hangover. Electrolyte levels don’t change much when you’re hung over.
As for sugary drinks, it might be wise to avoid them. One study showed that a factor making hangovers worse was lactate. Where does lactate come from? Combining ethanol (booze) with glucose.
Nevertheless, if low blood sugar was the problem, a morning-after cupcake should help cure the hangover. Research says it doesn’t.
The alcohol-purity argument you often hear from fans of pure vodka also may have a drop of truth to it: Some drinks contain lots of fermentation byproducts called “congeners.”
One study, which hasn’t been published but was presented at a conference, ranked drinks with lots of congeners as major hangover producers.
In order from worst hangover inducers to least, the paper said, are brandy, red wine, rum, whisky, white wine, gin, then vodka. But this hasn’t been proven.
Is a hangover a kind of drug withdrawal? Probably not. The symptoms are different.
So, why does hair of the dog seem to work? For a roundabout reason:
Methanol — wood alcohol, the bad stuff, the kind that keeps hillbilly ophthalmologists in business — is actually present in small amounts in nearly every kind of alcoholic drink. The body breaks down these trace amounts quickly but turns it to formaldehyde, which in turn converts to formic acid, or ant venom.
Formic acid is nasty stuff. It inhibits the use of oxygen, which first manifests itself as poor vision because the optic nerves require lots of oxygen. A dose of ethanol, or hair of the dog, distracts your alcohol-breakdown enzyme: It drops the methanol and focuses on the ethanol. The methanol then may be excreted before it turns into poison. Doctors even treat methanol poisoning with ethanol, Rogers says.
The bad news is that the effect doesn’t last long enough for all the methanol to dissipate, so it generally just postpones the hangover. And as you’d guess, it’s correlated with problem drinking.
Some researchers discount the methanol-poisoning theory of hangovers entirely. They point instead to elevated levels of molecules called cytokines, which are essential to the immune system but in high levels cause inflammation. Injecting subjects who haven’t had a drink with these little devils causes nausea, headache, chills, fatigue, memory impairment — the teetotaler’s hangover.
So, when can we expect the big breakthrough — the magic bullet that shoots down all those Silver Bullets that laid you low?
It could be in a drug called ampelopsin, aka dihydromyricetin, found in oriental raisin trees. It’s a traditional Chinese cure that may actually work, and is now being sold over the counter as BluCetin.
UCLA researcher Richard Olsen, who has been studying the effects of low to moderate drinking, thinks the drug may bind to an ethanol receptor called delta-GABA-R — and deflect booze.
Then again, do we really want a society in which heavy drinking occurred without automatic retribution? College students might binge-drink themselves into a collective stupor. Drunk driving could see an uptick. And, alarming as it is to think about, “The Hangover, Part IV” could be even more boring than III.