You know you’ve been there—churning stomach and pounding head the morning after a party. So what do you do to alleviate the self-inflicted misery of a hangover?
There’s always the “hair of the dog”. Matthew Vondenstein tends bar at the Lock and Key in Baton Rouge. He says one of his customers swears by a particular whiskey cocktail.
“He orders a ‘muddled orange’—heavily, heavily, heavily bittered with Angostura and Peychaud’s,” Vondenstein says. “And then he has me top that with a little soda and put a raw egg on top of it.”
But Dr. Frank Greenway, a metabolic researcher at LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center, says adding more alcohol isn’t the answer to the misery you feel the morning after a night of heavy drinking.
“Hangovers take place when the alcohol level is back down to zero. It’s what happens after you drink,” Dr. Greenway explains. He adds it’s a natural byproduct of how the body deals with ingestion of alcohol. “You know, alcohol is converted to acetaldehyde and it’s acetaldehyde that tends to be one of the more toxic metabolites of alcohol.”
Some research has shown that an amino acid in eggs—cysteine—can bind to the acetaldehyde, and reduce its effects, hence that raw egg in the hair of the dog.
Another Lock and Key bartender, Benjamin Moore, swears by cooked eggs.
“I like a bowl of soup. Egg drop soup is usually the best, I find—easiest on the stomach,” Moore says. “And a cup of black coffee. That usually gets me through the morning.”
In other words, lots of liquids. That illustrates what Dr. Greenway says is the biggest factor in a miserable morning after: dehydration.
“Being well-hydrated can help the symptoms of being hungover,” Greenway states, adding that drinking a full glass of water in between each alcoholic beverage may prevent some of those symptoms.
There’s a clinic in New Orleans that offers IV hangover help. $150 gets you treated with an IV full of fluids, vitamins and electrolytes—and in less than an hour, you’re “cured”. But bartender Vondenstein says your local drugstore has a less expensive alternative, with no needles involved.
“Pedialyte.” Vondenstein says the same stuff pediatricians tell parents to give sick infants works wonders for adults who have over-indulged. “Put that over ice and it’s perfect. You finish a quart of that and you feel like a new person.”
But Dr. Greenway says the only truly guaranteed hangover cure is prevention.
“By and large, the best treatment for a hangover is not to drink too much.”
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