Can you cure a hangover? Do drinks with bubbles get you drunk quicker? Are darker drinks worse for you than clear drinks? Is there really such a thing as a beer gut? These questions and more are what I’ll be tackling in my annual Christmas special podcast on all things alcohol facts and fallacies.
Links referred to in the podcast
Episode transcript
To access the full episode transcript, go to the following link and select the individual podcast episode and then click on the ‘Transcript’ tab https://thinkingnutrition.buzzsprout.com
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Can you cure a hangover? Do drinks with bubbles get you drunk quicker? Are darker drinks worse for you than clear drinks? Is there really such a thing as a beer gut? These questions and more are what I’ll be tackling in my annual Christmas special podcast on all things alcohol facts and fallacies.
Links referred to in the podcast
Episode transcript
To access the full episode transcript, go to the following link and select the individual podcast episode and then click on the ‘Transcript’ tab https://thinkingnutrition.buzzsprout.com
Connect with me
Instagram: doctimcrowe
Facebook: Thinking Nutrition
Twitter: CroweTim
Can you cure a hangover? Do drinks with bubbles get you drunk quicker? Are darker drinks worse for you than clear drinks? Is there really such a thing as a beer gut? These questions and more are what I’ll be tackling in my annual Christmas special podcast on all things alcohol facts and fallacies.
What a year. I am sure many of you will be celebrating the end of another year living with COVID and hoping for a better 2022 ahead. Seems like a good time to get on the beers and over-indulge in the traditional party and celebration season. So, for this podcast, I’m turning to all things alcohol to look at some of the myths, facts and fallacies that go along with it.
So, let’s start with the big one when it comes to alcohol that every drinker wants an answer to: can you cure a hangover? Firstly, a bit of hangover science. Hangovers happen because alcohol (which is a toxin after all) has an acute effect on the brain and the rest of the body.
To start with, alcohol is a diuretic - that explains the dehydration and much of the regret you feel the next day from drinking too much. Frequent trips to the toilet during the night also mean sleep disturbances which makes you even more tired the next day.
But the symptoms of a hangover cannot all be blamed on dehydration and poor sleep. Alcohol irritates the stomach which leads to inflammation. It also causes the digestive system to produce more gastric acid. This contributes to the nausea and queasy stomach of a hangover.
Hangovers could also be driven by the way alcohol messes with your immune system. Studies have found strong correlations between high levels of cytokines – which are molecules that the immune system uses for signalling - and hangover symptoms. Normally, the body might use cytokines to trigger a fever or inflammatory response to battle an infection, but it seems that excessive alcohol consumption can also provoke cytokine release, leading to symptoms like muscle aches, fatigue, headache and nausea, as well as cognitive effects like memory loss or irritation.
It gets worse. When the body metabolises alcohol, it creates a toxic by-product called acetaldehyde which is estimated to be between 10 and 30 times as toxic as alcohol itself. The build-up of acetaldehyde leads to sweating, skin flushing, nausea, vomiting, and headaches.
What to do about it? The greasy breakfast is a popular hangover cure to help put a ‘lining back on your stomach’. The benefit the next day here is more a placebo effect which if it makes you feel better, then that’s not such a bad thing. With food, you get the greatest benefit for your hangover by having it the night before as food helps to slow down the absorption of alcohol from the stomach.
One thing that will certainly help with a hangover is to rehydrate. This is where those popular sports drinks may just be of benefit as they speed up water absorption and replace electrolytes lost through increased urination. Having it before bed may just be a good preventative measure too.
Then there is the popular ‘hair of the of the dog’ where you attempt to drink yourself out of a hangover. All this does is delay the hangover as your body switches to metabolising the new alcohol you’ve drunk. Once it has done that job, then you’re back to square one - and even worse, you’ve got more by-products of alcohol metabolism in your system.
The sad news is that there are no foods or supplements are proven to prevent hangovers (at least supplements that have been tested at least more than once), yet the Internet is full of supposed cures. Ginseng, Japanese raisin tree, prickly pear cactus, Korean pear, and a mixture of pear, green grape, and the Japanese herb Ashibata have all been tested and have at least one study to support them, but few have been replicated and more so, they only look at certain aspects of a hangover and are normally tested in a controlled situation which may not replicate that well a classic ‘big night out’ on the beers.
The British Medical Journal has also weighed into the elusive search for a hangover cure with a systematic review of randomised-controlled trials which I’ll link to in the show notes. But their comprehensive search for any medical therapy that could prevent or treat hangover came up with nought. Their conclusion? The most effective way to avoid the symptoms of a hangover is to practise abstinence or moderation. It may not be what you want to hear, but it is the most effective treatment we have yet. https://www.bmj.com/content/331/7531/1515
If you can’t cure a hangover, you can do some things to help reduce it the night before. And for that, make sure you:
Once you have a hangover, there’s no magic pill to cure it, but something as simple as aspirin and a strong coffee can help to clear your head and perk you up a little as you bunker down and wait it out.
Are dark drinks worse for you than clear?
On the topic of hangovers, let’s tackle something you may hear about alcohol and that’s dark coloured spirits such as whiskey and rum as well as red wine can make your hangover worse. And you heard correctly – there is truth to this. These types of drinks are high in distillation and fermentation products called congeners. Congeners are responsible for most of the taste and aroma of distilled alcoholic beverages and contribute to the taste of non-distilled drinks. Congeners are also considered a likely culprit in contributing to a hangover. So, there could just be something to be said for opting for white wine over red wine or vodka instead of bourbon.
Coffee
What about a strong cup of coffee? Will that help sober you up and banish a hangover? Caffeine will help make you more alert but will do little to help sober you up. Studies that looked at the effects of caffeinated versus non-caffeinated alcoholic drinks on a simulated driving task and alertness found that caffeine did not reduce the effects of alcohol on driving ability or reaction time.
Do bubbles make you drunk quicker?
Onto the next fact or fallacy and this one is for those who enjoy the odd glass of sparkling wine. Is it true that alcohol with bubbles really goes straight to your head? The answer here is: yes. We absorb the alcohol in carbonated drinks quicker and this can be seen by a faster rise in blood alcohol levels. That means you’ll start feeling the effects of intoxication quicker than usual, creating the sensation of the drink ‘going straight to your head. But not everyone experiences this the same as it can depend on a range of genetic and digestive factors.
The big question: why is it so? Science doesn’t understand what is going on fully but it could be related to the carbon dioxide gas bubbles changing the permeability of stomach and intestine linings and allowing more alcohol to be absorbed directly into the bloodstream. You see, unlike other nutrients, alcohol is absorbed directly into the bloodstream through the stomach lining where about 20 percent of it is absorbed. And it is also rapidly absorbed in the small intestine. Bubbles may speed up this process. And it also explains why you feel the effects of alcohol quicker if you drink on an empty stomach – there is less obstruction in the way blocking the path for alcohol to get into the blood from the stomach.
Beer belly
What about the beer belly? Is beer really responsible for a beer gut? The answer here is: no. Firstly, because it is mostly men who drink beer, then the ‘beer gut’ is seen simply because that’s where men usually store a lot of excess weight And the habits of big beer drinkers have been well-and-truly scrutinised and be ready to be astounded.
To explore links between beer drinking and beer bellies, European researchers studied the beer-drinking habits and long-term body and belly weight gain in Germans: one of the leading countries in the world in terms of beer consumption.
The beer consumption habits of almost 8,000 men and 13,000 women were collected and then the participants’ weight and waist circumference were monitored for the next 8.5 years. The researchers also tracked any major changes in their beer-drinking habits.
At the beginning of the study, men who drank the most beer were the most likely to have a beer belly. But no relationship between beer drinking and a beer belly was seen in women. Over the next 8.5 years, men who drank more than 1 litre of beer per day were 17 percent more likely to gain weight around their middle compared to men who were light drinkers.
The big finding of interest from the study though, was that when the researchers made allowance for change in overall body weight over time, beer did not influence waist circumference. Men who developed a beer gut were doing so because of gaining more weight overall, the beer was not going directly to the gut. And I’ll link to this study in the show notes. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19550430/
Does it make you warmer?
For the next fact or fallacy, I want you to picture the classic image of a Saint Bernard dog carrying a flask of brandy around its neck when rescuing people buried under snow in the French Alps. The ultimate in first aid for a near-freezing person. Anyone who has necked down a shot of straight whiskey or the like will be aware of the immediate warming effect of the alcohol. But it is all smoke and mirrors.
That warming effect is made by blood vessels dilating and stimulation of nerve endings in the skin. But it comes at a cost: it can actually make your body temperature fall. Dilated blood vessels mean they’re closer to the skin surface so will radiate heat quicker. Furthermore, alcohol diminishes the amount the body shivers. The result of all this: body heat is lost at a faster rate.
Now, none of this is an issue if enjoying a glass of wine in front of a warm fire, but if you’re outside in the elements, then alcohol is not your friend.
Are there health benefits?
One final question to ponder today is if there could there be any health benefits to be gained from the pain that alcohol can cause you. The health harms of alcohol are long indeed so I won’t go into a lot of detail about those in this podcast, but every now and then you see something surface about the health benefits of alcohol. Is there any truth to this? A low level of alcohol consumption may offer a small benefit in reducing overall earlier mortality rates – mostly by offering some degree of protection against coronary heart disease in those with existing risk factors. Alcohol can raise the levels of HDL-cholesterol. This is the type of cholesterol that removes cholesterol from the blood and reduce the ‘stickiness’ of blood and the risk of blood clots forming.
Scientists call the observed small health benefit of alcohol 'the J curve effect' where a benefit is seen with light to moderate amounts of consumption (1-2 drinks per day), but skyrocketing health risks with increasing consumption. There is debate though if the J curve effect may be from other factors such as healthier lifestyles of light drinkers, rather than the alcohol itself.
The truth is though that any health benefits of alcohol are limited to men over the age of 40 and women over the age of 50 and who drink one to two standard drinks daily or less. Younger people do not get the same health benefits from drinking.
So, this will be my last episode for 2021, but I’ll be back again early in 2022 with more new episodes. Thank you to everyone for your support of the podcast, your kind comments, reviews, and suggestions for episodes. It all makes it worth doing and the download stats reflect this as I’m ticking over close to 700,000 downloads of this show. That’s something worth drinking to.
So that’s it for today’s show. You can find the show notes either in the app you’re listening to this podcast on if it supports it, or else head over to my webpage www.thinkingnutrition.com.au and click on the podcast section to find this episode to read the show notes.
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I’m Tim Crowe and you’ve been listening to Thinking Nutrition.