If the driving force of a hangover is dehydration, why does chasing each drink with an equal glass of water not really work for preventing a hangover?
In: Biology
Simple google and you’ll find that ethanol not only causes dehydration, but also gastrointestinal irritation, imbalances electrolytes, impairs the immune system, lowers blood sugar level, causes vasodilation (widens blood vessels) and ruins the quality of your sleep. All contribute to feeling like shit.
Alcohol is a diuretic so it’ll make you pee a lot. If you’re drinking water with alcohol then you might simply be expelling it.
If, after drinking, before bed, you drink as much water as you can then it’ll help a bit better.
Have you tried it? It does work in my experience. The problem is that few people are disciplined enough to do so in the heat of the moment.
Hangovers are complex things and aren’t yet fully understood. It’s not just dehydration, though it might be part of it. The diuretic effect of alcohol just makes you pee out the water anyway, and while the alcohol byproducts take time to filter through your liver, pee is readily generated. That’s why you pee clear when you’re intoxicated
Alcohol dehydrogenase is an enzyme that converts alcohol to acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde is responsible for many of the unpleasant hangover symptoms. The more you drink the more you saturate these enzymes and it takes longer to clear the acetaldehyde. The more alcohol, the longer it takes since there’s a limited amount of enzyme molecules and a limited rate that each enzyme can process each molecule of alcohol. These enzymes also come at a cost of energy that changes the fuel demand dynamics in the cell leading to a cascading effect of altered metabolism in otherwise unrelated enzymes which probably has other significant effects but I do not remember them.
The hangover is partially a result of alcohol’s tendency to replicate the activity of GABA (the neurotransmitter) and thus interfering with your brain’s natural activity. You end up literally pissing away a whole lot of GABA when you urinate during a drinking session.
As your brain detoxifies and goes back to using GABA (please forgive my clumsy command of English), you start to feel worse and then better.
This is not prevented by the drinking of water.
Because dehydration is only part of it. When drinking, you basically poison yourself. The thing is, together with ethanol, you ingest distillation byproducts, such as acetone, methanol, acetaldehyde, formaldehyde etc. Some of these things are highly toxic. You ingest small amounts, hence you don’t get blind and don’t die, but it is sure enough to give a nasty hangover. You can look up congeners for more info.
Whenever you decide to get shitfaced, opt for pure alcohols with lower congener count for instance vodka and gin. Congeners also give distinct flavours, hence other alcohols are distilled in a way to keep more of them.
And btw, forget the bs you see around the internet, that says sugar in your cocktails has anything to do with this. Human body is extremely effective at processing sugar. Bet you never got a headache from eating all ben& Jerry’s by yourself.
With an alcoholic father who is about to die from his addiction, I can tell you one of the long-term effects of alcohol overindulgence is nerve damage from alcohol using up your vitamin B, leading to something like myelin sheath issues.
I don’t know the scientific explanation, but for a 5yo it might suffice to say that you’re also likely to be short on vitamin B by the time you wake up. It always helps me tremendously to have a couple of B supplements before bed if I’ve had a big night. It’s also likely this is why Berocca (a soluble B supplement drink capsule) is a common hangover cure.
If you check out nootropic stacks, you’ll see some interesting results. Nootropic stacks are combinations of supplements taken together. There is a science to them: increase one supplement too much and you can kick off a process which results in all your Vitamin A being depleted, giving you a headache. So they include vit A in the stack to account for this.
I suggest hangovers are causing something along those lines, too. A multivitamin, or a handful of them, is likely a really good idea.
There is more, than just dehydration. So enough water doesn’t solve the problem, but definitelly helps aleviate it.
(Also – someone should have a talk with your parents 🙂 )
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