A Roundup Of Tactical Drinking Tips For Seamless Hangover Management

In addition to Thanksgiving weekend’s fine cornucopia of real American football — how about that do-or-die Alabama touchdown down in the last thirty seconds of the Iron Bowl? — the holiday forms the official kickoff of the hangover season. Year’s end — and especially a gnarly roller coaster year’s end such as that of 2023 — will inevitably confront us with serried challenges of overindulgence. Since nobody goes to the office any more there will be, de facto, less pre-Xmas drinky-events jamming the calendar. Despite that, the shopping-nightmare juggernaut and the seasonal celebration mash-up do still present a tempting landscape in which to reach for a glass or three of something that stands a chance of bucking you up for the run through the gauntlet.

Short and sweet: These next few weeks mean far more extra work for your liver. There are a few tactics to ease the metabolic load, as well as a host of mostly ineffective moves that have been passed down in song and story and have retained currency, either for their entertainment value, or because a cult has of belief has sprung up around them. All are fair game, or at least worth a modicum of exploration to help ameliorate the inevitable drag-assing of whatever day-after awaits you.

To establish a grasp of the myth-laden, somewhat circus-like “hangover remedy” landscape, we’ll begin with what happens in the moments after you swallow the firewater. Alcohol takes many lovely forms, but the body can’t be taught to recognize that that is a super-silky $15,000 magnum of ’82 Chateau Petrus you just ordered. Your body sees the introduction of any ethanol as straight-up dirty-as-it-gets poison, and kicks into gear to rid you of it. That, in a nutshell, is the crux of the holiday enigma: You taste what you perceive as a pleasurable potable. Your body thinks the opposite, and it will punish you for thinking what you think. With a hangover. Ironically, hangovers begin as the liver works to force blood alcohol levels to fall.

Bluntly put, time is the one true hangover cure, and the length of time you spend “hung” in that more or less torturous state depends on the length of time it takes your cells to metabolize the ethanol (pure alcohol, expressed as a percentage in whatever tasty form, beer, wine, spirit). The poison has to be broken down by the body into more palliative form (of acetate), which then can be processed out as waste (through breath, urine, et al.). When that work is done, your hangover fades.

Rates of recovery vary, but on average it takes about an hour for a healthy liver to process 10 grams of alcohol, which is 4 grams shy of what would be contained in a single “standard” drink in the U.S., as calculated by the National Institutes of Health to hold some 14 grams of ethanol. As it is broken down by the two powerful enzymes in the liver to be expelled, the ethanol is poised in your bloodstream, where it can be easily measured — hence the forensic avenue into your evening’s elbow-bending that the police often use, the humble breathalzyer.

The crux of the matter, as well as the major, known tip for those fellow citizens who may be tempted to drive themselves home: One double Johnnie Walker Black on ice, would contain some 28-30 grams of ethanol, depending on the generosity of your bartender’s pour. To metabolize that, it would take two hours and then some of not drinking. But, you know. That first Johnnie Walker slides down real easy-like, and your cohort is raging around you for a second round. how tempting that second round is

Put another way, at that pour of a double, that’s two hours and then some to metabolize (again, for every drink containing 3 fluid oz. of a 40% distillate). Oenophiles do not get a free hall pass in this. It takes the same two hours to process two 5-oz. glasses of wine with dinner, calculated at 12% strength.

Ergo: If, as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald routinely did, or certain friends of mine routinely do, if you are sitting at the bar in the Paris Ritz knocking back a few, sooner or later, you’re going to need to change tack to help the liver do its processing — meaning, beyond the Roaring Twenties solution of never ceasing to drink.

What we could term the “Scott and Zelda” tactic has as its core tenet the notion of somehow magically outrunning your hangover. And that is, sort of, possible, as Manchester City soccer star Jack Grealish proved last summer on his five-week post-season trans-continental bender. But Mr. Grealish, who was celebrating among teammates an especially successful European season for his team, is an especially fit human. Over the decades, the vocabulary describing it has become more medically aware: It’s known at universities across the U.S. and the Continent as binge drinking.

A binge corollary long-touted as the ne plus ultra of hangover silver bullets is the hair of the dog — which presumes that you were either a), conscious enough to crawl into bed or b), drank until you passed out, then woke up and, what-ho, rallied enough to lead a charge on the bottle again in the rude light of day. Among other cultural niceties, this impulse gave rise to the Bloody Mary, and, some cultural historians would offer, the whole notion of a “weekend brunch.”

Medically speaking, however, the hair of the dog only ladles more poison-mining and shifting work onto the liver, and that complex organ, God bless it, absolutely will have its day at the time and place of its choice, whether we, its hosts, like it or not.

Much post-binge myth is made around the cheeseburger-with-the-works and its attendant bucket of home fries as the silver bullet. Fat has many purposes in a diet, some of them beneficial. One bartender of my acquaintance swears by the melted cheese. Specifically, however, neither the burger nor the freight of the cheese help the liver call forth the hormones that break ethanol down into acetate, which is the main path by which your hangover exits you. The carbohydrates in the fries and your burger bun may actually aid recovery, some evidence suggests. And, the burger can help as a pathway to triggering a post-prandial nap — which is to say, along with headaches, sleep disturbances are very much part being hung, so, a sluglike crawl into bed as your liver defangs the ethanol can, also, ease some of the pain.

The key tactic is pacing your intake — admittedly difficult in a holiday rager — in tandem with hydration.

Happy holidays to all.