The secret to avoid hangovers

Washington: European researchers have now established that try as you may to change around the order of your alcoholic beverages, if you indulge too much in drinks, you will still be hung-over.

The researchers recruited 90 volunteers between the ages of 19 and 40 to drink beer, wine or both. One group drank two-and-half pints of beer, followed by large glasses of wine. The second group drank the four glasses of wine first, then two-and-half pints of beer. A third group drank only beer or only wine. Everyone was kept under medical supervision overnight.

The researchers then let the alcohol wash out and people recover, and a week later, brought everybody back for a second day of drinking. This time, people drank in the reverse order: Those who had started with beer on the first day were given wine this time, those who had started with wine were given beer first, and those who had drunk only beer were given wine and vice versa.

The results, published Thursday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, show no difference in the intensity of the hangover brought on by drinking wine first followed by beer or the other way around.

Speaking about the study, Jöran Köchling, one of the authors of the study said, "We didn't find any truth in the idea that drinking beer before wine gives you a milder hangover than the other way around.”

Two factors did seem to predict the severity of symptoms the day after – how drunk people felt while they were drinking and whether they vomited. The people who scored themselves higher on the 1 to 10 how-drunk-are-you scale at the end of the night and those who threw up at any point were the ones most likely to rate their hangover as severe.