What exactly is a hangover?
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Your liver produces an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase, which it uses to “detoxify” ethanol. Unfortunately it breaks down ethanol by converting it to ethanaldehyde. The symptoms of ethanaldehyde poisoning are nausea, vomiting and headache.
Your liver also has a trick for converting ethanaldehyde into ethanoic acid, but if you drink enough you’re going to have all the elements of the ethanol – ethanaldehyde – ethanoic acid chain floating around in your blood at once, because it takes time to process it all.
The reason people end up blind, paralyzed and dying from drinking methanol is that your liver tries to process that with alcohol dehydrogenase too, and converts it into methanaldehyde, aka formaldehyde, which is quite toxic and especially harmful to nerve cells.
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