Scientists Share How to Avoid Holiday Hangovers

The holidays are often known for excessive food, but it’s also prime time for drinking. Whether you’re enjoying a glass of wine with your Christmas ham or a glass of champagne to ring in the new year, the alcohol will likely be flowing from now through the end of the year. 

While you’ve probably heard plenty of advice over the years about how to best avoid hangovers, you might have still ended up laying in bed nursing a bad headache. But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Julia Chester is a neuroscientist at Purdue University who studies alcohol’s effects on the brain. “How concentrated that drink is and how fast you’re drinking it are the primary determinants of the effects,” Chester told Scientific American in a recent interview. While many blame hangovers on chemicals in darker liquors, there isn’t enough evidence to suggest clear liquors are better. And while some evidence implies that carbonation speeds up alcohol consumption, it doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods just because you’re sipping on bubbly. 

“I’d much rather be looking at the specific [amount of] alcohol of the drink on the label than I would on whether it had bubbles or not,” Mark Bellis, a public health scientist at Liverpool John Moores University in England, told the publication.  

Bellis went on to state the importance of knowing how you react to a certain type of alcohol before imbibing on New Year’s Eve. 

“People develop a tolerance to the levels of alcohol they’re consuming, and I think they also develop a familiarity with how that alcohol will affect them,” he said. “There is something physiological about being used to drinking alcohol at certain levels, but also there’s something behavioral about understanding how a particular alcohol does affect you.”

Related: Can Your Child’s Pedialyte Cure an Adult-Sized Hangover?

Ultimately, the best way to avoid a hangover is to not drink, as a perfect cure-all for hangovers has yet to be discovered (and may never will be). The jury is still out on whether so-called “hangover cures” are actually scientifically supported. 

In a 2021 review published in the Addiction journal, scientists examined past studies centered around hangover cures like clove extract, red ginseng, and Korean pear juice to get to the bottom of the problem. They found that although some studies showed noticeable improvements in hangover symptoms, the evidence wasn’t strong enough to make a solid claim either way. Overall, no two studies have covered the same hangover remedies, so it’s impossible to confidently say which ones work better. 

“Only very low quality evidence of efficacy is available to recommend any pharmacologically active intervention for the treatment or prevention of alcohol-induced hangover,” the authors wrote. 

Luckily, preventing hangovers during the holiday season should be easier than doing so during a night out at the bar. Chester emphasized that the best way to ward off a hangover is to eat something before drinking and to stay hydrated while drinking, ideally switching off between alcohol and water the whole time. While eating food and staying hydrated softens the blow of a hangover, we might still feel it the next morning. 

Just make sure you do as much preparation for Dec. 31 so you don’t spend all of Jan. 1 in bed.