Prevention's Quick Fix: 7 Easy ways to avoid a hangover
If this weekend's plan includes any revelry-of the St. Patrick's Day variety or otherwise-consider some preventive steps to survive the day after. "There's good evidence emerging that the chief cause of hangover is acute withdrawal from alcohol," says Mack Mitchell, MD. "The cells in your brain physically change in response to the alcohol's presence, and when the alcohol's gone-when your body's burned it up-you go through withdrawal until those cells get used to doing without the alcohol."
Couple that with the effects that alcohol has on the blood vessels in your head (they can swell significantly, depending on the amount you drink) and you end up living through a day after that you'd rather forget. If you want to avoid the misery and still have a good time, here's how:
1) Drink slowly. The slower you drink, the less alcohol reaches your brain-even though you may actually drink more over the long haul. The reason, according to Dr. Mitchell, is simple math: Your body burns alcohol at a fixed pace of about 1 ounce an hour. Give it more time to burn that alcohol, and less will reach your blood and brain.
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2) Drink on a full stomach. "This is probably the single best thing you can do, besides drinking less, to reduce the severity of a hangover," Dr. Mitchell says. "Food slows the absorption of alcohol, and the slower you absorb it, the less alcohol actually reaches the brain." The kind of food you eat doesn't matter much.
3) Avoid the bubbly. That doesn't mean just champagne. Anything with bubbles in it is a special hazard, making a rum-and-Coke just as bad as champagne, say Dr. Blum and Dr. Mitchell. The bubbles move the booze into your bloodstream much more quickly. Your liver tries to keep up but can't, and the overflow of alcohol pours into your bloodstream.
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4) Drink the right drinks. What you drink can play a major role in what your head feels like the next morning, according to Kenneth Blum, PhD. The chief villains are congeners. "Congeners are other kinds of alcohols [ethanol is what gets you drunk] found in essentially all alcoholic beverages," Dr. Blum says. "How they work isn't known, but they're closely related to the amount of pain you experience after drinking." The least perilous concoction is vodka. The most perilous are cognacs, brandies, whiskeys, and champagnes of all kinds. Red wine is also bad but for a different reason. It contains tyramine, a histamine-like substance that produces a killer headache. Anyone who's spent an evening entertained by a bottle of red wine knows what we're talking about.
5) Try prickly pear cactus. Researchers at Tulane University found that drinkers who took two capsules of an extract of prickly pear cactus 5 hours before imbibing had 50 percent fewer hangover symptoms than those who popped a placebo. One theory is that compounds in prickly pear cactus boost the body's production of heat-shock proteins, which limit inflammation caused by overimbibing.
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6) Be size smart. With few exceptions, there's no way a 110-pounder can go one-on-one with a 250-pound drinker and wake up the winner. So scale down your drinks. To come out even, the 110-pounder can handle about half the alcohol of the 250-pounder.
7) Have an Alka-Seltzer cocktail at bedtime. "There's no hard scientific data on this, but my own clinical experience and that of a lot of others says that water and Alka-Seltzer before going to bed can make your hangover much less of a problem," says John Brick, PhD. Others claim that two aspirin tablets (which is really Alka-Seltzer without the fizz) can also help.
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What's your go-to hangover cure?
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