christmas-food-for-thought-which-booze-causes-the-worst-hangover

What’s Christmas without a bottle of good wine, a snifter (or two) of peaty Ardburg and a few raunchy family tales that, upon awakening the next morning with a pulsing head and stone-cold sober realization, counts as Too Much Information should never had graced your ears?

If you’re like me, however, you’re probably in too much misery to care about what your 65-year-old-aunt-did-in-that-summer-30-years-ago. Despite its long history and frequent occurrence, hangovers remain enigmatic monsters that haunt those reckless enough to seek the dew of the gods with no reservation. The symptoms appear AFTER the alcohol is eliminated from the body, and (against popular belief) may not be a direct result of dehydration.

Physiological causes aside, perhaps it’s more useful to figure out what type of booze precipitates the worst hangovers all else equal. One common rumour is that dark-coloured alcohols – think bourbons, dark rum and scotch – give more of a punch than their paler counterparts.

Alcohol by itself is colorless. The colour of unadulterated alcoholic beverages comes from congeners – chemicals other than ethanol that seep into the final product due to the fermentation and aging process. They are complex organic molecules with toxic effects, including acetaldehyde (metabolite of ethanol that gives the “Asian glow”), tannins (astringent-tasting molecules found in red wines) and even methanol. That’s not the say they’re BAD – bourbon contains 37 times more of these flavorful molecules than vodka, which gives them their distinctive taste. Nevertheless, congeners are thought to make hangovers worse. A study in 2009 put this theory to the test, pitting Wild Turkey bourbon against Absolute vodka.

Researchers recruited 95 college-aged, non-alcoholic participants and invited them for two wine-and-dine sessions in the lab. One of the nights they got either bourbon or vodka mixed with coke to mask the taste, the other night they got coke-mixed tonic water as a non-alcoholic control bevarage. After ensuring the participants were indeed intoxicated, researchers put them to bed. Since alcohol negatively affects the quality and duration of sleep, researchers monitored the participants’ sleep architecture. The next morning, the team measured the intensity of the participant’s hangovers with a symptom-based scale and tested the subject’s cognitive function with 2 tasks that required sustained attention and reaction time.