By Joan Acocella, The New YorkerOf the miseries regularly inflicted on humankind, some are so minor and yet, while they last, so painful that one wonders how, after all this time, a remedy cannot have been found.
If scientists do not have a cure for
cancer, that makes sense. But the common cold, the menstrual cramp? The hangover is another condition of this kind. It is a preventable malady: don't drink.
Nevertheless, people throughout time have found what seemed to them good reason for recourse to alcohol.
One attraction is alcohol's power to disinhibit-to allow us, at last, to tell off our neighbor or make an improper suggestion to his wife. Alcohol may also persuade us that we have found the truth about life, a comforting experience rarely available in the sober hour.
Through the lens of alcohol, the world seems nicer. ("I drink to make other people interesting," the theatre critic George Jean Nathan used to say.) For all these reasons, drinking cheers people up.
See Proverbs 31:6-7: "Give . . . wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more." It works, but then, in the morning, a new misery presents itself.
A hangover peaks when alcohol that has been poured into the body is finally eliminated from it-that is, when the blood-alcohol level returns to zero. The toxin is now gone, but the damage it has done is not.
By fairly common consent, a hangover will involve some combination of headache, upset stomach, thirst, food aversion, nausea, diarrhea, tremulousness, fatigue, and a general feeling of wretchedness.
Scientists haven't yet found all the reasons for this network of woes, but they have proposed various causes.
One is withdrawal, which would bring on the tremors and also sweating. A second factor may be dehydration. Alcohol interferes with the secretion of the hormone that inhibits urination. Hence the heavy traffic to the rest rooms at bars and parties.
The resulting dehydration seems to trigger the thirst and lethargy. While that is going on, the alcohol may also be inducing hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), which converts into light-headedness and muscle weakness, the feeling that one's bones have turned to jello.
Meanwhile, the body, to break down the alcohol, is releasing chemicals that may be more toxic than alcohol itself; these would result in nausea and other symptoms.
Finally, the alcohol has produced inflammation, which in turn causes the white blood cells to flood the bloodstream with molecules called cytokines.
Apparently, cytokines are the source of the aches and pains and lethargy that, when our bodies are attacked by a flu virus-and likewise, perhaps, by alcohol-encourage us to stay in bed rather than go to work, thereby freeing up the body's energy for use by the white cells in combatting the invader. In a series of experiments, mice that were given a cytokine inducer underwent dramatic changes.
Adult males wouldn't socialize with young males new to their cage. Mothers displayed "impaired nest-building." Many people will know how these mice felt.
But hangover symptoms are not just physical; they are cognitive as well. People with hangovers show delayed reaction times and difficulties with attention, concentration, and visual-spatial perception. A group of airplane pilots given simulated flight tests after a night's drinking put in substandard performances. Similarly, automobile drivers, the morning after, get low marks on simulated road tests.
Needless to say, this is a hazard, and not just for those at the wheel. There are laws against drunk driving, but not against driving with a hangover.
Hangovers also have an emotional component. Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking, described this phenomenon as "the metaphysical hangover": "When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. . . . You have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is."
Some people are unable to convince themselves of this. Amis described the opening of Kafka's "Metamorphosis," with the hero discovering that he has been changed into a bug, as the best literary representation of a hangover.
The severity of a hangover depends, of course, on how much you drank the night before, but that is not the only determinant. What, besides alcohol, did you consume at that party? If you took other drugs as well, your hangover may be worse.
And what kind of alcohol did you drink? In general, darker drinks, such as red wine and whiskey, have higher levels of congeners-impurities produced by the fermentation process, or added to enhance flavor-than do light-colored drinks such as white wine, gin, and vodka.
The greater the congener content, the uglier the morning. Then there are your own characteristics-for example, your drinking pattern. Unjustly, habitually heavy drinkers seem to have milder hangovers. Your sex is also important.
A woman who matches drinks with a man is going to get drunk faster than he, partly because she has less body water than he does, and less of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, which breaks down alcohol. Apparently, your genes also have a vote, as does your gene pool.
Almost forty per cent of East Asians have a variant, less efficient form of aldehyde dehydrogenase, another enzyme necessary for alcohol processing. Therefore, they start showing signs of trouble after just a few sips-they flush dramatically-and they get drunk fast. This is an inconvenience for some Japanese and Korean businessmen.
They feel that they should drink with their Western colleagues. Then they crash to the floor and have to make awkward phone calls in the morning.
Hangovers are probably as old as alcohol use, which dates back to the Stone Age. Some anthropologists have proposed that alcohol production may have predated agriculture; in any case, it no doubt stimulated that development, because in many parts of the world the cereal harvest was largely given over to beer-making.
Other prehistorians have speculated that alcohol intoxication may have been one of the baffling phenomena, like storms, dreams, and death, that propelled early societies toward organized religion. The ancient Egyptians, who, we are told, made seventeen varieties of beer, believed that their god Osiris invented this agreeable beverage. They buried their dead with supplies of beer for use in the afterlife.
Alcohol was also one of our ancestors' foremost medicines. Berton Rouech?, in a 1960 article on alcohol for The New Yorker, quoted a prominent fifteenth-century German physician, Hieronymus Brunschwig, on the range of physical ills curable by brandy: head sores, pallor, baldness, deafness, lethargy, toothache, mouth cankers, bad breath, swollen breasts, short-windedness, indigestion, flatulence, jaundice, dropsy, gout, bladder infections, kidney stones, fever, dog bites, and infestation with lice or fleas.
Additionally, in many times and places, alcohol was one of the few safe things to drink. Water contamination is a very old problem.
Some words for hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are "still drunk," the Japanese "two days drunk," the Chinese "drunk overnight." The Swedes get "smacked from behind."
But it is in languages that describe the effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power.
Salvadorans wake up "made of rubber," the French with a "wooden mouth" or a "hair ache."
The Germans and the Dutch say they have a "tomcat," presumably wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a "howling of kittens."
My favorites are the Danes, who get "carpenters in the forehead." In keeping with the saying about the Eskimos' nine words for snow, the Ukrainians have several words for hangover. And, in keeping with the Jews-don't-drink rule, Hebrew didn't even have one word until recently.
Then the experts at the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in Tel Aviv, decided that such a term was needed, so they made one up: hamarmoret, derived from the word for fermentation. (Hamarmoret echoes a usage of Jeremiah's, in Lamentations 1:20, which the King James Bible translates as "My bowels are troubled.")
There is a biochemical basis for Jewish abstinence. Many Jews-fifty per cent, in one estimate-carry a variant gene for alcohol dehydrogenase. Therefore, they, like the East Asians, have a low tolerance for alcohol.
As for hangover
remedies, they are legion. There are certain unifying themes, however. When you ask people, worldwide, how to deal with a hangover, their first answer is usually the hair of the dog. The old faithful in this category is the Bloody Mary, but books on curing hangovers-I have read three, and that does not exhaust the list-describe more elaborate potions, often said to have been invented in places like Cap d'Antibes by bartenders with names like Jean-Marc.
An English manual, Andrew Irving's "How to Cure a Hangover" (2004), devotes almost a hundred pages to hair-of-the-dog recipes, including the Suffering Bastard (gin, brandy, lime juice, bitters, and ginger ale); the Corpse Reviver (Pernod, champagne, and lemon juice); and the Thomas Abercrombie (two Alka-Seltzers dropped into a double shot of tequila).
Kingsley Amis suggests taking Underberg bitters, a highly alcoholic digestive: "The resulting mild convulsions and cries of shock are well worth witnessing. But thereafter a comforting glow supervenes." Many people, however, simply drink some more of what they had the night before.
My Ukrainian informant described his morning-after protocol for a vodka hangover as follows: "two shots of vodka, then a cigarette, then another shot of vodka." A Japanese source suggested wearing a sake-soaked surgical mask.
Application of the hair of the dog may sound like nothing more than a way of getting yourself drunk enough so that you don't notice you have a hangover, but, according to Wayne Jones, of the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Medicine, the biochemistry is probably more complicated than that.
Jones's theory is that the liver, in processing alcohol, first addresses itself to ethanol, which is the alcohol proper, and then moves on to methanol, a secondary ingredient of many wines and spirits. Because methanol breaks down into formic acid, which is highly toxic, it is during this second stage that the hangover is most crushing.
If at that point you pour in more alcohol, the body will switch back to ethanol processing. This will not eliminate the hangover-the methanol (indeed, more of it now) is still waiting for you round the bend-but it delays the worst symptoms. It may also mitigate them somewhat. On the other hand, you are drunk again, which may create difficulty about going to work.
As for the non-alcoholic means of combatting hangover, these fall into three categories: before or while drinking, before bed, and the next morning. Many people advise you to eat a heavy meal, with lots of protein and fats, before or while drinking.
If you can't do that, at least drink a glass of milk. In Africa, the same purpose is served by eating peanut butter. The other most frequent before-and-during recommendation is water, lots of it. Proponents of this strategy tell you to ask for a glass of water with every drink you order, and then make yourself chug-a-lug the water before addressing the drink.
A recently favored antidote, both in Asia and in the West, is sports drinks, taken either the morning after or, more commonly, at the party itself. A fast-moving bar drink these days is Red Bull, an energy drink, mixed with vodka or with the herbal liqueur J?germeister. (The latter cocktail is a Jag-bomb.)
Some people say that the Red Bull holds the hangover at bay, but apparently its primary effect is to blunt the depressive force of alcohol-no surprise, since an eight-ounce serving of Red Bull contains more caffeine than two cans of Coke.
According to fans, you can rock all night. According to Maria Lucia Souza-Formigoni, a psychobiology researcher at the Federal University of S?o Paolo, that's true, and dangerous. After a few drinks with Red Bull, you're drunk but you don't know it, and therefore you may engage in high-risk behaviors-driving, going home with a questionable companion-rather than passing out quietly in your chair.
Red Bull's manufacturers have criticized the methodology of Souza-Formigoni's study and have pointed out that they never condoned mixing their product with alcohol.
When you get home, is there anything you can do before going to bed? Those still able to consider such a question are advised, again, to consume buckets of water, and also to take some Vitamin C. Koreans drink a bowl of water with honey, presumably to head off the hypoglycemia.
Among the young, one damage-control measure is the ancient Roman method, induced vomiting. Nic van Oudtshoorn's "The Hangover Handbook" (1997) thoughtfully provides a recipe for an emetic: mix mustard powder with water. If you have "bed spins," sleep with one foot on the floor.
Now to the sorrows of the morning. The list-topping recommendation, apart from another go at the water cure, is the greasy-meal cure. (An American philosophy professor: "Have breakfast at Denny's." An English teen-ager: "Eat two McDonald's hamburgers.
They have a secret ingredient for hangovers.") Spicy foods, especially Mexican, are popular, along with eggs, as in the Denny's breakfast. Another egg-based cure is the prairie oyster, which involves vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, and a raw egg yolk to be consumed whole.
Sugar, some say, should be reapplied. A reporter at the Times: "Drink a six-pack of Coke." Others suggest fruit juice. In Scotland, there is a soft drink called Irn-Bru, described to me by a local as tasting like melted plastic. Irn-Bru is advertised to the Scots as "Your Other National Drink."
Also widely employed are milk-based drinks. Teen-agers recommend milkshakes and smoothies. My contact in Calcutta said buttermilk. "You can also pour it over your head," he added. "Very soothing."
Elsewhere on the international front, many people in Asia and the Near East take strong tea. The Italians and the French prefer strong coffee. (Italian informant: add lemon. French informant: add salt. Alcohol researchers: stay away from coffee-it's a diuretic and will make you more dehydrated.)
Germans eat pickled herring; the Japanese turn to pickled plums; the Vietnamese drink a wax-gourd juice. Moroccans say to chew cumin seeds; Andeans, coca leaves. Russians swear by pickle brine. An ex-Soviet ballet dancer told me, "Pickle juice or a shot of vodka or pickle juice with a shot of vodka."
Continued~~~
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