You know that old adage about beer before wine? Or is it beer before liquor?
In any case, no matter what order you consume your booze, it’s gonna hurt the next day, according to a new scientific study from researchers at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany and the University of Cambridge in the U.K.
In the study (“Grape or Grain But Never the Twain?”) published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, ninety volunteers between 19-40 years old were split into three groups, and then each group consumed a combination of lager beer and white wine, but in different orders (with one control group which just had either beer or wine only). Then a week later, the groups switched their drinking order. Appropriate amounts of water and medical supervision were given before each group went to sleep, and each participant was asked to track their drunkenness and next-day hangovers.
The only clear result is that women had slightly worse hangovers than men, while no other factor — what they drank, in what order, age, drinking habits, etc. — seemed to predict hangover intensity. That said, the study did conclude, “Multivariate regression analyses revealed perceived drunkenness and vomiting as the strongest predictors for hangover intensity.”
“Unfortunately, we found that there was no way to avoid the inevitable hangover just by favoring one order over another,” says Dr. Kai Hensel, the senior author of the study and total buzzkill.
Photo: Divya Thakur/Flickr Creative Commons
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