Show Notes
The Science of Hangovers: Why Your “Cure” Probably Doesn’t Work You wake up thirsty. Then, almost immediately, you realize your head hurts. Your stomach feels unstable. The room is too bright. Your mouth tastes like regret and old wine corks. Furthermore, your intestines suddenly decided today is the day they become extremely efficient. In other words, you have a hangover. Now, hopefully, this is not a regular occurrence. Nevertheless, most adults eventually experience one. The evening starts innocently enough: good friends, great conversation, maybe a cocktail before dinner. Then, however, another bottle arrives. Someone orders dessert drinks. Suddenly, what seemed like sophisticated socializing turns into next-morning negotiations with your nervous system. And that raises the obvious question: What actually causes a hangover? More importantly, why do so many supposed “cures” fail so spectacularly?
First, Alcohol Is Not Just “Dehydration” Many people think a hangover is simply dehydration. Certainly, dehydration matters. Alcohol suppresses vasopressin, the hormone that helps your kidneys conserve water. As a result, you urinate more frequently. Consequently, you lose fluid and electrolytes. However, dehydration is only part of the story. In fact, hangovers are far more complicated. Alcohol irritates the stomach lining. Additionally, it disrupts blood sugar regulation. Furthermore, it interferes with inflammatory pathways, sleep architecture, hormone signaling, and neurotransmitters involved in mood and alertness. So while dehydration contributes to the misery, it does not fully explain why you feel like a Victorian ghost haunting your own apartment. Moreover, alcohol affects sleep in a particularly cruel way. It helps many people fall asleep quickly. However, it fragments restorative sleep later in the night. Therefore, you may technically be unconscious for eight hours while still waking up exhausted. You passed out. You did not recover.
Then There’s Acetaldehyde — But It’s Not the Whole Story Social media wellness culture loves one word: Acetaldehyde. This is the toxic metabolite created when your liver breaks down alcohol. And yes, acetaldehyde contributes to flushing, nausea, headache, and inflammation. Nevertheless, modern marketing often exaggerates its role because it creates a simple story. “If acetaldehyde is bad, then a supplement that lowers acetaldehyde must solve hangovers.” Unfortunately, biology is rarely that convenient. Hangovers are not caused by one molecule acting alone. Instead, they are the result of multiple overlapping physiologic stresses happening simultaneously. In other words, there is no single “off switch.” And that is exactly where the supplement industry enters the picture.
The Rise of the “Hangover Cure” Industry Over the last several years, social media has become flooded with products promising recovery, detoxification, or “support” for drinking. For example: Cheers Restore ZBiotics Myrkl H-PROOF DHM Detox Dose for Liver
Furthermore, many of these products use similar language: “supports liver health,” “helps metabolize alcohol,” “promotes recovery,” or “supports detoxification.” Notice the wording carefully. Most companies avoid explicitly claiming to “cure” hangovers because proving that scientifically would require strong clinical evidence. And, unfortunately for marketing departments everywhere, that evidence largely does not exist.
So Do These Products Work? The honest answer is: Probably not very well. Now, to be fair, some ingredients are biologically plausible. For instance, DHM — dihydromyricetin — has shown interesting effects in animal studies involving alcohol metabolism and GABA signaling. Likewise, some probiotics may influence acetaldehyde metabolism in the gut. Meanwhile, antioxidants and electrolytes may help support recovery in limited ways. However, plausible does not mean proven. That distinction matters enormously. Most studies on hangover products are: small, poorl
More from Fork U with Dr. Terry Simpson
With all the spices we have access to, it is amazing how bland recipes have become. I have many cookbooks, some from great chefs, television personalities, and friends. What I am always surprised by is how bland the food has become. People seem to think a bit of salt, pepper, maybe onions, and garlic provide the spices one needs. Perhaps it is because some associate spice with heat. Mostly because many have never experimented with some of those great warm spices available. A pinch of coriander, some freshly ground cumin, a little cardamom, or a touch of cinnamon can turn an ordinary dish into something remarkable. And the most astonishing part is that these spices financed voyages around the world, built cities, created fortunes, and caused people to kill one another. Without the spice trade, it is safe to say that the United States, as we know it, would be vastly different from what it is now. The money loaned to the United States, when we were a fledgling country, came from the wealthy spice merchants from what was considered one of the great hyperempires of the world, based in Amsterdam. But before we go to the birth of the United States, let me take you to the meatball.
Tea: The Drink That Built an Empire—and Helped Break One China had the tea. Britain had the appetite. John Hancock had a business to protect.
MesoAmerica and Chocolate In our series looking at foods that built civilizations, today we are going to stay in the Americas with chocolate. Chocolate has been used as currency, consumed by kings, incorporated into religious ceremonies, and prescribed as medicine. Today, it is a multibillion-dollar industry that wants you to believe that eating chocolate is an act of preventive cardiology. I mean, why not? They convinced us to give chocolate to people we love, eat it when we are happy, when we are sad, when only the dog understands us. Don’t feed chocolate to your dog. And we have done all this with a bitter seed that most of us would probably spit out if we tasted it straight from the tree.
I’ve been doing a series about foods that built civilizations. In this episode, we are talking about the potato. It is difficult to imagine that thousands of years ago, people constructed large buildings, managed rivers, built monuments, and created art. We have glimpses of these civilizations through stories, archaeology, and the structures they left behind, but much of their history has been lost. Imagine, we don’t even know where Cleopatra or Alexander the Great are buried, yet we know their stories. As European powers conquered Indigenous peoples, their languages, cultures, and oral traditions were suppressed. When a language disappears, so are the stories preserved within it. Our clues come from archaeology when we uncover a monument, a building, or an ancient settlement. In the Andes, the potatoes they cultivated were not the Russets, Yukon Golds, or fingerlings you find in the store today. Different colors, shapes, and textures. Adapted to survive the elevations, temperatures, and growing conditions. Biodiversity protected their food supply against frost, disease, and changing environmental conditions. If one variety failed, another might survive. The ancient wisdom of diversity that Andean farmers developed over thousands of years was lost when the potato eventually reached Ireland.
In our series about foods that built civilization, we talked a lot about grains, from wheat to corn to rice. Today, we are taking you to the ocean, with the civilizations that salmon built. From California to the interior of Alaska, salmon, a staple, allowed people to settle into villages, develop complex social networks, art, and trade routes. Those trade routes are as large as the ones in the Mediterranean. Some tribes built communal homes and developed complex art and language. Some were Seafaring tribes with canoes up to 60 feet long that traveled across oceans. All because there was a fish that would return in large numbers to streams and rivers, reliably, predictably. So predictable, the people could build their lives around salmon runs. So much so that some built a calendar not only with lunar cycles, but also with the return of the salmon. Civilizations have always gathered around food and water. The Mediterranean connected people who grew wheat and olives, giving people time to make wine, mine copper, build ships, trade with their neighbors, and occasionally go to war with them. Asia had rice and grain near the great river systems. The reliable calories from rice and grains allowed villages to become cities and to travel by water to trade. Today we are going to my home, from the Ventura River in California to my home state of Alaska.