What\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re like me, however, you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
Physiological causes aside, perhaps it\u2019s more useful to figure out what type of booze precipitates the worst hangovers all else equal. One common rumour is that dark-coloured alcohols \u2013 think bourbons, dark rum and scotch \u2013 give more of a punch than their paler counterparts.<\/p>\n
Alcohol by itself is colorless. The colour of unadulterated alcoholic beverages comes from congeners \u2013 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 \u201cAsian glow\u201d), tannins (astringent-tasting molecules found in red wines) and even methanol. That\u2019s not the say they\u2019re BAD \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 sleep architecture. The next morning, the team measured the intensity of the participant\u2019s hangovers with a symptom-based scale and tested the subject\u2019s cognitive function with 2 tasks that required sustained attention and reaction time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What\u2019s 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\u2019re like me, however, you\u2019re probably in too […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}