New research points away from eating a large breakfast or gulping down a Caesar as effective treatments for a hangover. Neither of these helps eliminate levels of acetate in your bloodstream.
Put down the Bloody Mary, back away from the McDonald’s drive-through, throw the sausages out of the frying pan. None of them is going to cure that hangover.
All you really needed is a cup of coffee and aspirin — at least if you’re a rat with a soft spot for ethanol.
Professor Michael Oshinsky, of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, induced headaches in rodents by injecting them with small doses (about the equivalent of one drink in humans) of ethanol.
Ethanol, like more common bar drinks, produces acetate in the body when it is metabolized, and it is here, Oshinsky believes, where the cause of our post-drink head pain resides.
“People in the past thought acetate was innocuous because you have high levels of it in your body to begin with,” said Oshinsky in an interview with the Star.
But in drunk rats, acetate alone brings on throbbing heads.
How can you tell if a rat has a headache? “The skin around its eyes becomes sensitive to touch,” says Oshinsky.
The severity of a headache depends on the individual or, in this case, the not-so-hard-partying rat, but the cure for all of Oshinsky’s specimens was the same: caffeine and anti-inflammatories.
Oshinsky insists that none of the commonly cited causes of hangovers could have caused the headaches in his lab rats. Because the rats were injected with ethanol, they were not dehydrated. The pure alcohol used was also free of the toxins and additives often blamed for hangovers brought on by mass-produced booze.
“The work had never been done in the past (to isolate the cause of headaches), it was mostly conjecture” says Oshinsky.
“Dehydration is not necessary to induce the headaches” he adds. “I’m not saying that dehydration is not a cause (of headaches), I’m just saying that in alcohol it is not the only issue.”
This rules out drinking water instead of caffeine to rehydrate your body and eliminate a throbbing head.
Oshinsky’s research also seems to detract from the benefits of a full English breakfast or a quickly gulped Caesar — neither of these helps eliminate levels of acetate in your bloodstream.
And don’t blame the colour of the drink special for keeping your head on your desk, says Oshinsky.
“There is nothing available in alcohol in terms of impurities that is toxic enough to induce a headache.”
source: thestar
No comments:
Post a Comment