Beer Before Wine and You’ll Feel Fine
Orange County, CA - February 8th, 2019 - The myth about drinking beer before wine to prevent a hangover has been proven false by researchers from Cambridge and Witten/Herdecke University in Germany. No matter what type of alcohol you drink first, the study finds, your hangover will be just the same.
Researchers gathered ninety participants between 19 and 40 to drink beer, wine, or both. For a more accurate comparison, participants were compared to two others with the same sex and roughly the same body mass index, age, and drinking habits.
The first group drank two and a half pints of beer, followed by four large glasses of wine. The second group first drank the four glasses of wine, then the two and a half pints of beer, and the third group drank only beer or only wine. All participants were under medical supervision throughout the night.
Researchers allowed the participants to recover, and a week later brought them back for the second day of drinking. The groups drank in the opposite order, where those who 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 offered wine and vice versa.
Results showed there was no distinction of the intensity of the hangover brought on by drinking wine first followed by a beer or with the order reversed
. "We didn't find any truth in the idea that drinking beer before wine gives you a milder hangover than the other way around. The truth is that drinking too much of any alcoholic drink is likely to result in a hangover. The only reliable way of predicting how miserable you'll feel the next day is by how drunk you feel and whether you are sick. We should all pay attention to these red flags when drinking," said Jöran Köchling, lead author of the study, and a researcher at Witten/Herdecke University. Researchers are aware of the limitations of this study. For instance, they weren’t able to assign a control group to drink beer or wine without alcohol, due to the participants having no interest in taking part in being in a non-alcoholic group, in an alcohol study. The study was published Thursday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
. "We didn't find any truth in the idea that drinking beer before wine gives you a milder hangover than the other way around. The truth is that drinking too much of any alcoholic drink is likely to result in a hangover. The only reliable way of predicting how miserable you'll feel the next day is by how drunk you feel and whether you are sick. We should all pay attention to these red flags when drinking," said Jöran Köchling, lead author of the study, and a researcher at Witten/Herdecke University. Researchers are aware of the limitations of this study. For instance, they weren’t able to assign a control group to drink beer or wine without alcohol, due to the participants having no interest in taking part in being in a non-alcoholic group, in an alcohol study. The study was published Thursday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
