Drinking beer before wine won鈥檛 save you from a hangover. This is according to rigorous tests performed with 90 volunteers.
The idea of the study was to test the old adage: 鈥渂eer before wine and you鈥檒l feel fine; wine before beer and you鈥檒l feel queer.鈥� Similar sayings exist in French and German.
The participants, aged between 19 and 40, were split into three groups. The first group drank beer until their breath alcohol concentration reached 0.05 per cent, then drank white wine until their breath alcohol reached 0.11 per cent. In the second group, the two drinks were switched. People in these two groups typically drank around 1.3 litres of beer and 600 millilitres of wine. The聽third group drank only beer or only wine.
Advertisement
A week later, the experiment was repeated, with the first and second groups switched. The non-mixers who drank beer switched to wine and vice versa.
The next day, they completed a questionnaire about their hangover symptoms, including headache, fatigue, thirst, dizziness and nausea. There were no significant differences between any of the three groups, suggesting not only that there is no safe order for mixing drinks, but sticking to one drink isn鈥檛 much help either.
Vomiting and self-rated drunkenness the night before correlated with hangover scores in the morning, but other factors, such as age and sex, did not have a significant effect.
How to avoid a hangover
The only way to avoid a hangover is not to drink as much, says Kai Hensel at the University of Cambridge, UK. 鈥淎fter doing 360 blood and urine tests and spending almost 拢10,000 on lab analysis, the predictor is asking people how drunk are you and do you have to vomit.鈥�
What actually causes the symptoms of hangover is still something of a mystery. Dehydration and the metabolic products of alcohol are thought to play a role. So are chemicals called congeners, which are more abundant in dark spirits than clear ones.
Hensel says the sayings about beer before wine originated in medieval times, when drinks and hygiene conditions were very different, so they might once have been true. Alternatively, they might refer to changes in fortune, with wine and beer symbolising rich and poor lifestyles.
