The order you drink different types of alcohol does not affect how hungover you get, according to a new study
‘Beer before wine, and you’ll be fine’ is a saying you hear, suggesting that if you switch from drinking beer to wine, you won’t get too drunk or hungover – but going from wine to beer is a dangerous decision.
However, new research has disproved that rhyme.
British and German researchers conducted a study of 90 people to see if the order they consumed drinks had any effect of their subsequent hangovers – and they found it did not.
All the volunteers were given a meal, then split into three groups. The first group drank two and a half pints of lager, then four glasses of wine. The second had the same but in the opposite order. The third had only wine or beer. The experiment was controlled to make sure that all participants had the same amount of alcohol in their bodies, regardless of what type of drinks they had.
A week later, they did it all again, only the participants who started with beer took wine first, and vice-versa.
Both times, they were monitored overnight, and ranked their hangover on a scale which included thirst, fatigue, headache, dizziness, nausea, stomach ache, heart rate and loss of appetite.
About one in ten of them threw up, all in the name of science.
The study found that drink order had no impact on “hangover intensity”.
“We debunked the saying, it’s not true,” said Kai Hensel, senior clinical fellow at Cambridge University. “You’re going to be the same whatever order you drink these beverages in.”
“The truth is that drinking too much of any alcoholic drink is likely to result in a hangover,” said Jöran Köchling from Witten/Herdecke University in Germany, and the first author on the study. “The only reliable way of predicting how miserable you’ll feel the next day is by how drunk you feel and whether you are sick. We should all pay attention to these red flags when drinking.”
