Does drinking beer before wine really reduce the risk of a hangover? Science says no
Before you get carried away with alcohol this New Year’s Eve, read this
If you’ve ever heard the saying “Beer before wine makes you feel fine; wine before beer makes you feel queer”, and taken it as official medical advice, we’ve got some bad news: the order in which you consume different alcoholic drinks makes no difference to your chances of suffering a hangover the next day, researchers have found.
The traditional piece of folk wisdom is an age-old English aphorism, and similar sayings also exist elsewhere in Europe. But scientists in Germany and England have now established that the order in which you consume drinks doesn’t matter.
“We didn’t find any truth in the idea,” says the study’s first author Joeran Koechling. “Drinking too much of any alcoholic drink is likely to result in a hangover.”
The team from Witten/Herdecke University in Witten, Germany, and Britain’s University of Cambridge studied 90 volunteers split into three groups. The first consumed around two and a half pints of lager followed by four large glasses of white wine. The second drank the same amounts, but in reverse order. Subjects in the third, control group consumed either only beer or only wine.
Participants were asked to score their drunkenness on a scale of zero to 10 at the end of each study day. Before going to bed they were given an amount of refrigerated drinking water tailored to their body weight, and then kept under medical supervision overnight. The following day, participants were asked about their hangover and given a score from zero to 56 based on factors including thirst, fatigue, headache, dizziness, nausea, stomach ache, increased heart rate and loss of appetite.
A week later, the first and second study groups were switched to the opposite drinking order. Control group subjects who drank only beer the first time round received only wine on the second study day (and vice versa). So the groups were not only compared with each other, but each participant was also their own control. The researchers found that none of the three groups had a significantly different hangover score.
The results are published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The study’s senior author, Dr Kai Hensel, believes that while hangovers are unpleasant, they do have one important benefit: “They can help us learn from our mistakes,” he said.
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