Eating a pearbefore a big night out might make your hangover less terrible, but once you're stumbling home at 3 a.m., there's nothing you can do to prevent a hangover the next morning. According to a new study by Dutch and Canadian scientists, drinking water and eating greasy pizza or a questionable burrito won't reduce your chances of a hangover, Mashable reports.
What's more, the study suggests that people who claim to be immune to hangovers, which is about 20 to 30 percent of the drinking population, are actually just drinking less than they realize.
For the study, 789 Canadian students were surveyed about their drinking habits during the previous months. They were asked about the number of drinks they had, the timeframe in which they consumed them, and how severe their hangover was the next day. The researchers calculated the Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) of students who experienced hangovers and students who didn't, and of the students who didn't report a hangover, 79 percent had an estimated BAC of less than 0.1 percent. In other words, rather than being immune to hangovers, they were just drinking way less alcohol.
To test whether eating or drinking after a night out reduced the chances of a hangover, researchers surveyed 826 Dutch students about their last night of heavy drinking. They found that about half (54 percent) ate after drinking, but those students reported about the same level of hangover as students who didn't eat.
Dr. Joris Verster, the study's lead author, summed things up nicely:
From what we know from the surveys so far, the only practical way to avoid a hangover is to drink less alcohol.
Verster emphasizes that these results are based on surveys alone — based on this preliminary research, he hopes to move forward with controlled trials.
