Is there anything in grape or grain, but never the twain?
It has always struck me that there is something of the puritan about a hangover. After all, you pay at leisure for some momentary pleasure. Oscar Wilde, perhaps, got it right; moderation in everything, including moderation.
Seasoned topers have their own tried and tested methods of avoiding hangovers. Mine is to stick to one type of drinks and on no account to mix beer and wine. My hangover cure is to have a hair of the dog, the original phrase was to have a hair of the dog that bit you, as soon as I can stomach it.
But am I being unnecessarily cautious in my choice of drinks? Is it just quantity and not type that leads to a hangover?
My attention was drawn to the February 1st 2019 edition of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, not part of my staple fare of reading material, I must confess, and an article with the unappetising subtitle of “A randomised controlled multi-arm matched triplet cross-over trial of beer and wine”. It outlined the research carried out by four principal researchers at the German university of Witten/Herdecke.
I will not bore you with the minutiae of the study, if you’re interested, follow this link https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/109/2/345/5307130?searchresult=1 , but they set out to find, in a controlled experiment, whether drinking beer and then wine or wine and then beer or just beer on its own or simply wine had any effect on the intensity of your hangover. It is gratifying to learn that the best brains are plying their grey cells to these problems of our diurnal existence.
They assembled a group of 90 volunteers, I can’t imagine they were hard to come by, who were aged between 19 and 40. Each was given the same meal, the condemned man and all that, and then they were split up into groups.
The first group drank two and half pints of lager, donated by Carlsberg, and then four large glasses of white wine. The second group drank the wine first, followed by the lager. The third group drank either only lager or just wine. Each participant was monitored regularly and when their breath alcohol concentration reached 0.11%, they stopped drinking and were packed off to bed with a glass of water of a size commensurate with their body weight.
The next day, they were quizzed as to how they felt, just what you want after a night on the tiles, and their responses were scored against the Acute Hangover Scale, developed by some scientists in the early 21st century to measure immediate hangover symptoms. I must look into this. Around 10% of the participants reported what the Australians colourfully term an upchucky moment.
A week later, the groups reassembled and drank the reverse of what they had consumed the previous time. Again, they were monitored and the intensity of their hangovers were recorded.
When it came to comparing the results, the scientists found no obvious correlation between the order that you consumed beer and wine or whether you restricted yourself to one or the other on the intensity of your hangover. In a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, for which scientific endeavour has been renowned over the centuries, they were forced to admit that it was quantity that impacted your hangover and that warning signs such as feeling tipsy and/or nauseous were reliable indicators that you might feel under par the following morning. You don’t say!
The veracity of the results has already been challenged. One scientist pointed out that the researchers had studiously avoided dark drinks, like red wine and beer. These alcoholic beverages contain congeners which, whilst adding flavour and character, have unpleasant side-effects which can increase the likelihood and intensity of your hangover.
But if the German study is to be believed, we can rid ourselves of the canards that you should never mix beer with wine or if you do, drink beer first.
I will enjoy testing out their results.
If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Curious Questions by Martin Fone
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