The Hangover Cure

This coming week’s newsletter comes a day early. Why? Because tomorrow is new year’s eve, and you’ll want time to prepare for it (and maybe do a little shopping for the products recommended in this newsletter).

Let’s face it. You’re going to be drinking tonight. And you may not feel that great tomorrow morning. That’s why this newsletter is all about the hangover cure, and how to prevent a hangover.

Keep in mind, none of these work 100% of the time, but they minimize the chances of a hangover.

What Causes a Hangover?

Very often, your favourite drinks have other alcohols in them besides ethanol. These other alcohols are often added to give the drinks a certain taste. But because these extra alcohols aren’t as “pure” as ethanol, they have negative side effects.

So drinking alcohol causes hangovers through several different mechanisms:

1. Ethanol (the alcohol) gets converted into acetaldehyde (a chemical that can be cancer-causing), which is essentially a poison. Your body detects that, and goes into emergency mode. It stops everything it’s doing (like digesting your food) while it works hard to detoxify your body.
2. The detoxification process involves peeing out a lot of the bad stuff in the alcohol, which causes dehydration. The dehydration is another cause of the headaches and fatigue you feel as a result of hangovers.
3. This detoxification process is very demanding on the liver, which causes you to lose a lot of nutrients needed for the production of energy. These include mostly the B vitamins.
4. You create a lot of free radicals (which are basically like little knives that go around inside your body, damaging cells) in the process of detoxification.

The Hangover Cure

1. One way to prevent hangovers is to order the “good stuff.” The more expensive drinks are more expensive for a reason: they’re purer and have less preservatives, so there’s less to detoxify.
2. Drink water. If dehydration is one of the causes of a hangover, drinking water helps reduce the symptoms.
3. Take a B complex. You can get this at any health food store. Make sure that it has 100mg of all the B vitamins except B12 and folate.

• If you want a very good B complex, look for a formula that has high choline (over 200mg) and folate in the form 5-MTHF (for the geeks, that stands for methyltetrahydrofolate. Right. I bet you wish you didn’t ask).

1. Take an antioxidant formula. Again, you can buy these from a health food store.
2. Although I personally don’t drink, a Russian folk remedy for hangovers is to drink fermented cabbage juice. How it works, I have no clue, but if you’re brave enough for this experiment, let me know how it works for you. Hey, if the Russians know something it’s how to get rid of hangovers.
3. If you want the \”hangover cure smart bomb\”, go for IV therapy. Basically, massive doses of nutrients are injected into you. By bypassing the digestive system, you feel better in a hurry. This is actually what celebrities use to get over hangovers. Fortunately you don\’t have to go to Hollywood to get it. Dr. John Dempster, ND does IV therapy at his clinic in Toronto\’s Yorkville neighbourhood.

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Avoid!

Under no circumstances should you combine tylenol with alcohol. That could lead to potential liver damage.

Short Summary

Hangovers are caused by:

• The toxicity of alcohol itself
• Dehydration
• Liver damage
• Free radical damage

You can prevent hangovers by:

• Ordering better drinks
• Drinking water
• Taking a B complex
• Taking an antioxidant mix
• Drinking fermented cabbage juice