No one is immune to the head-spinning pain of a hangover, and drinking those extra glasses of water won’t help, according to a new study presented at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology.
Soberingly, the study found that the only “practical way to avoid a hangover is to drink less alcohol,” wrote the study’s lead author, Joris Verster, a professor at Utrecht University.
A third of drinkers claim to have never experienced a hangover, so researchers decided to investigate this first. It turns out that these individuals had simply never reached the blood alcohol concentration required for the nasty day-after side effects: four-fifths (79 percent) of those who claimed not to experience hangovers had an estimated blood alcohol level of less than 0.10 percent. While that is too high to drive, it’s not enough for a hangover.
Scientists reached this conclusion after testing 789 Canadian students over the course of a month. The number of drinks, the student’s weight, and other factors were weighted to reach an estimate of their Blood Alcohol Concentration.
Scientists then wanted to know if eating a lot of food or drinking water would dampen a hangover’s punishing after-effects. They surveyed 826 Dutch students and their drinking habits, tracking students’ food and water intake post-alcohol consumption and asking them to rate their hangovers.
“Those who took food or water showed a slight statistical improvement in how they felt over those who didn’t, but this didn’t really translate into a meaningful difference,” wrote Verster.
What the study did find was “a pretty straight relationship” between how much you drink and how miserable you will feel the next day. “The more you drink, the more likely you are to get a hangover,” he said.
